James
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Affiliate Summit West 2015
I missed it last year so am really looking forward to getting back to Vegas for some blackjack, craps and roulette. No meetings before midday this time, live and learn! I first went to affiliate summit in 2012 and in my opinion it’s the best show of the year. The location, the parties, the sheer…
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Why postback pixels aren’t good enough
What is it with the increase in use with global postbacks? This is where you send the network an id and they send it back to you if it converts. It seems that some affiliates are actually using this type of tracking and optimising on a single tracking system. For the love of god can…
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Passing Through Landing Page Variables
This was inspired by another post which is well worth a read at: http://affplaybook.com/blog/affiliate-marketing/the-ultimate-guide-to-landing-page-tricks/ So many traffic sources provide you with tags such as {keyword} {countrycode} {device} etc. You can add these variables to your url so it would look something like: http://www.myserver.com/landingpage.htm?kw={keyword}&device={device} Then in the code to your landing page you can access these…
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Scalling Prosper202
An excellent article from prosper202 on how to scale out to multiple servers efficiently: http://prosper.tracking202.com/blog/tutorial-how-your-current-server-setup-is-costing-you-big-time?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+prosper202+%28Prosper202+Development+Blog%29
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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…
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Mobile Multivariate Testing with SubID’s
Due to slow page load speeds it is advised to keep tracking software to minimum when running mobile campaigns. This caused me a problem when trying to develop and optimise a mobile landing page. Because I wasn’t using prosper or any other tracking software I couldn’t plug in my custom multivariate testing scripts. I was…
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Neverblue Out of Bounds Whistler 2012
Some photos from the Whistler trip with Neverblue. Top of Whistler Mountain Neverblue Party Crew Ice bar View from ATV ride Victoria home of the Neverblue offices It was a great opportunity to spend time with the Neverblue team, other affiliates and spammers alike. Alot of fun, left handed drinking, good food and all the…
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Simple HTML Cheat Sheet
Rich’s Simple HTML Cheat Sheet <h1>This is a heading</h1> <b>This is bold</b> <i>This is itallic</i> <br /> = New line = Extra Space <a href=”contacts.htm”>Contact Form</a> = Link <img src=”images/picture.jpg” /> = image <font size=”3″>hello world</font> = changes font size Lists <ul> <li>List item1</li> <li>List item2</li> </ul> Tables <table> <tr> <td>top left</td> <td>top…
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Prosper202 Mod – Set preferences before crashing server
Had a bit of an issue with Prosper crashing once the database got too big. I would log out and leave the analysis preferences set to my biggest traffic source and when I logged back in the server would crash as it tries to pull a report before you can modify the search critieria. I…
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Romania Advertising Agency – Oops Media
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Reasons to Love Neverblue in 2012/2013
Looks like Neverblue are taking their affiliates to Phuket Thailand in March 2013! Wow!
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What was that Country Code?
Have problems remembering all the different country codes for geolocation scripts etc? Switzerland gets me everytime! Here’s a handy list you can use to check before you code. I use Maxmind but this will be accurate for any software that uses the ISO 3166 standard. AD = Andorra AE = United Arab Emirates AF =…
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Apache Logs – Disk Space Ubuntu Plesk
One of my servers started groaning early last week and it turned out I had log files accumulating to nearly 1TB. Log rotation was switched on but it still wasn’t ideal. I solved this by ssh’ing into a root shell and running the following command: du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n…
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Anyone planning on running $15,000,0000 to Clickbooth this Summer?
I know there are other prizes further down the list but really… That works out at $166,666.66 USD a day in revenue. If Mark Zuckerberg is reading stick some 300×250’s on your site and you could keep the new shareholders happy and get yourself an island. For everyone else if you can get their offers…
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Cupid PLC Kildermorie Lodge Scotland
Thank you so much to all the team at Cupid PLC for organising an amazing trip to Kildermorie Lodge, near Inverness, Scotland. I’ve never been so surrounded by forward thinking people and whiskey. Here’s some photos from the trip: Fishing, shooting, Glenmorangie tour, great food and possibly the darkest game of charades ever played! Thanks…
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Googler Helping Affiliates…. in 2012!
Just when you think everyone working under advertising at Facebook and Google has been treated to a common sense bypass I get a lovely message like this. Hello James, Thank you for writing in. Hope you’re doing well! I’m Jaya, from the Google AdWords Support Team and I’ll be assisting you with your queries today.…
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Script.aculo.us – Interactive Landing Pages
Interaction is key in modern web design and one of the tools I’ve found to be very helpful in making a more interactive environment is script.aculo.us It is basically a javascript inlcude which can provide you with a whole load of effects and functions to use on your landing pages. Check out a simple example…
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Virgin Media Blocks Piratebay.se
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Internet World London 2012
Earls Court, London was home to Internet World 2012 and on a wet Wednesday morning in April I jumped on a train to check it out. It was my first visit to this show and I came away with mixed feelings. I was hoping it was going to be like ad-tech but there was only…
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15 Tools I Couldn’t Live Without
Everyone has their own set of tools that makes their day to day working life easier. Below I have made a list of the tools I use regularly and recommend to others. Notepad ++ – A great little text editor for windows (I use Kate in Linux). I pretty much hand code everything now so…
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Affiliate Marketing 101 | A Timeline for Success
Time Frame: 3 Years Day 1 – The Study Period Read, read, read. You’ve probably heard from a friend, colleague or just through the grapevine that people are making alot of money promoting affiliate products online and want a piece of the action. It’s time to start soaking up knowledge to give yourself an idea…
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Direct Response Marketing Pushing CPC Prices Up – The Future for Google Adwords
I was asked to setup a little campaign for an offline electrical company on “The Google”. The business they operate in is electrical testing or PAT testing as it is known here in the UK. It’s the kind of industry where I wouldn’t expect to find much competition when it comes to online marketing. That…
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The Neverblue Velo Bankruptcy Saga
On April 3rd Velo Holdings the parent company of Vertrue which in turn is the parent company of Neverblue (have I got that right?) filed for bankruptcy. Performer insider released an “affiliate marketing is dead” post and I’m sure alot of affiliates, myself included, panicked. A generic email followed which stated “we intend to make…
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Ruby & Selenium Script to Check Google SERP ranks
Haven’t used this in a while but it used to work really well untill google would throw a captcha at you after the first 5000 queries. Might be of use to someone. It’s designed for linux and you’ll need selenium up and running to work it. #!/usr/bin/env ruby require ‘rubygems’ gem ‘selenium-client’ require ‘selenium/client’ system(‘java…
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Engage BDR – Self-serve RTB
Have you seen these ads all over the internet? Chances are pretty high it was probably served by Engage BDR. Up until now their minimum deposit just to test a campaign was $25,000 USD. Which for most affiliates is completely out of reach but now they have released a new real time bidding platform which…
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Handling large volumes of data with Prosper202
IMO the default version of prosper202 isn’t really designed to handle large volume media buys. The latest version 1.7.2 does make it easier with a simple click to clear click data button but it can still prove difficult to pull off reports once the ammount of data you are analysising exceeds a certain limit. The…
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Captcha Cracker For PHPBB written in Ruby
It’s been a while since I’ve done much in SEO so I am going to start publishing some of my old scripts. This is a captcha cracker which uses gocr and image magick to decipher phpbb captchas. It’s written in ruby and was designed as part of a backlink building module. You’ll need linux, gocr,…
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Rotating Offer Pages and Landing Pages in Prosper202
It is really easy to setup rotation of urls in Prosper but if you actually want to track which url is doing better or you want to test different landing pages it can be a little more challenging. One way to do this is to set each url or landing page up separately and then…
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SiteScout RTB – A Walk Through
Update 23/08/12 – If you are interested in working with Sitescout make sure you check out their superb knowedge base. Sitescout is a great traffic source for display advertising. They basically act as a reseller for remnant traffic from some of the biggest ad exchanges in the world. There is needless to say massive volume…
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Jim.am Acquired
With more than just a slight nod of the head to my favourite online marketing blog MrGreen.am I have moved the blog away from the business website to jim.am OK 3rd best might be a little bit of an exageration but if I can get the content flowing and get some interest I think it…
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In-Text Advertising | Ultimate Guide
Updated April 2020 In-text advertising is a form of digital advertising that replaces words on a website with links paid for by advertisers. An advertiser bids for keywords and provides a destination URL. These keywords are replaced with links using a Javascript snippet on the publishers website. In 2020 the leading in-text advertising networks are:…
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Tracking CPS Networks With Prosper202 and CPV Lab
In the UK alot of affiliate marketing is done through cost per sale networks. The big ones being Tradedoubler and Affiliate Window. Here is how to integrate their backend systems with a performance based tracking system such as prosper202. TradeDoubler add &epi=[[subid]] Affiliate Window add &clickref=[[subid]] Affiliate Future add &tracking=[[subid]] Commission Junction add &sid=[[subid]] nb.it…
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Prosper 202 Mods 2012
Prosper202 mods 1) increase session life – stops it logging you out every five minutes when you are trying to work add the following line just before session_start(); in 202-config/connect.php ini_set(‘session.gc_maxlifetime’,99999); 2) bypass adverts on first page – bit naughty but I prefer to jump straight into the spy section to see whats been going…
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Big Thank You To Neverblue for Out of Bounds Dominican Republic
Just like to say a big thank you to Neverblue for organising Out of Bounds Dominican Republic. It was an amazing experience to be surrounded by like minded people and have all the luxuries the Neverblue team laid on. Sun Rise Punta Canna 2012 My main takeaways from the trip were:- Mobile advertising is expanding…
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Translation Options When Advertising Globally
When scaling successful campaigns to different countries the biggest stumbling block can be the language barrier. Unless you are a fluent or have a babelfish at hand the chances are that you are going to need some help to translate your ad copy. There are a number of options and we have outlined each below…
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Using Adsense Section Targeting
If you are getting lots of Groupon and Three ads on your adsense niche site the chances are it isn’t optimised correctly. By simply writing a short, keyword rich, snippet of what your site is about and surrounding it in the following tags you can manipulate which ads are shown. <!– google_ad_section_start –> Jet internet…
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Googles Panda Update, Brands and Negative PandaRank
More information has been coming out about the Panda update. Google have released a article on their webmaster blog describing how they see quality content. There were a few things that really stood out:- Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name? This seems to be a big hint towards…
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Affiliate Network and Payment Terms
There has been news this week of Epic/Azoogle stopping all weekly payments to affiliates. This has sent rumors of financial difficulties and cash flow problems circling the forums for one of the giant CPA networks. Just when the dust settles Maxbounty sends out a network email informing all affiliates they are improving their payment terms…
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Slow Site Speed Prevents Google Indexing Pages
We had a problem with one of our database sites not getting indexed as well as we have come to expect. After about a month it still only had arround 10% of the urls indexed from the sitemaps. We looked at the differences between this and other sites we had which were all going well.…
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Domain Trust Ranking Sites Without Backlinks Or Social Network Indicators?
For the last decade or more the SEO community has been obsessed with backlinks. Whether it be filling out profiles to get a quick link such as the famed Angela and Pauls packages or automated tools such as Xrumer and SENuke. Blog commenting, shout boxes, wordpress templates, sql injection, website widgets are just some of…
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The future of MFA (Made for Adsense) sites after the Google panda update
The big content directories such as ezinearticles, hubpages, articlesbase etc. All took a big hit with the Google panda update. It seems Google targeted low quality article databases with heavy blocks of adverts. These article directories have been abused by black and white hat link builders for the past decade. They allow people to post…
