A friend and client of mine asked me about SNEmpire today. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but a quick Google I discovered it’s a $500 social networking script. The sales page actually looks pretty good, but I went to one of the sites running the software (imsocialize.com) and was less than impressed by the user interface presented there.

Instead of recommending a buy, I pointed my friend to several open source social networking scripts that might server her needs:

Dolphin
The demo site and the showcase of sites running this script are very impressive.

Elgg
This looks like another contender. It’s got a pretty basic interface, but from a user standpoint, the simplicity is great.

Mahara
Mahara is a little less like Facebook, and a little more like LinkedIn. If your users are all about business and achievements, this might be the best solution for you.

Insoshi
A bit basic, but like Elgg, it’s got lots of potential.

PHPizabi
A great looking site right out of the box.

While each of these will require some customization, and they don’t come with tutorials, and maybe that makes all the difference to my friend. But making sure the foundation of my business — the software — is rock solid would be more important to me than spending time on the customization and learning curve were I planning a social networking site.

I love Google Docs. I use it all the time for just about everything from writing articles to formatting ebooks.

But when working on ebooks, I always had to download them into Open Office before exporting them as PDFs to add page numbers in the footer.

Then someone sent me link to their Google Doc file to help them with, and when I PDFed it to print out, IT HAD PAGE NUMBERS! Ok, maybe you’re not as excited as I was, but it really doesn’t take much to make me giddy.

I figured I had missed a menu item, so I wasted an inordinate amount of time looking for anything in the menu system of Google Docs that might add a page number.

No luck. But then under the edit menu, I unexpectedly hit upon the answer. I clicked on Edit HTML and scrolled down to the bottom of the document, and there it ws… span tags that will magically add page numbers, and/or a total page count to each page of your PDF when it’s exported.

Inside the DIV tag with the class=google_footer you can include one or both of these tags:
<span class=”google_pagenumber”>1</span>
(which will show the actual page number on your PDF, even though there’s a number 1 inside the tags.)
<span class=”google_pagecount”>1</span>
(which once again needs a 1 there in the document, but will actually show how many pages are in your document when it’s exported as a PDF.

So, if you wanted to add Page 5 of 150, for example, in your footer, you would add :
Page <span class=”google_pagenumber”>1</span> of <span class=”google_pagecount”>1</span>
in the footer.

While your fiddling with the HTML anyway, you can style the footer Div with a border-top or background color, or other neato stuff.

I used Google Docs to create the entire PDF I’m giving away as a newsletter signup bonus at PublishingCentral.com

The page numbers showed up great. Now if only I could get the TOC to work reliably, I’d love Google forever.

So far in this series we’ve created a way to redirect prospects sent by affiliates to oodles of different product sales pages from one clickbank account, and created custom affiliate URLs to ensure that affiliates are linking to your site, not Clickbank’s, for their affiliate links.

Today I want to solve on other problem I have with Clickbank.

When you run an affiliate program through Clickbank, you do not know who your affiliates are. All you know is their Clickbank ID.

I don’t really need to know their mailing address or the name of their pet canary, but it would be nice to have their name, email address and Clickbank ID.

It would be nice to be able to email affiliates about any special offers they could promote to their list.

It would be awesome to be able to send out an email to all my affiliates when I’ve got a new product.

Having a ready made list of people who might promote a new product is much more advantageous than starting from 0 affiliates with each product and hoping that a few folks will find it in the Clickbank marketplace.

And should I ever want to abandon Clickbank and move to a different affiliate management service, I would definitely want to tell all my affiliates about the new setup.

So, I need, at least in some minor way, to have my own affiliate list.

I decided that the most effective way to do this is with a combination of a bit of custom PHP and Aweber.
Read more…

Yesterday I created a simple (very, very simple) script to allow Clickbank merchants to redirect their hoplink to different products.

This is beneficial because it allows you to run affiliate programs for up to 50 products from one account, without creating a distracting intermediary page listing all your products. Running all your programs from one account also will increase the gravity of your account, making it look more appealing to affiliates in the Clickbank marketplace.

Today I’m going to create a script to go along with yesterdays redirection code to fix another problem I have with Clickbank. It’s nice to have a lot of affiliates linking to your products, but they’re not really linking to you. They’re linking to hop.clickbank.net.

Since we’re already giving affiliates custom codes to link to our products, why not add a second redirection script so that those custom affiliate codes give us the link love instead of Clickbank?

Yesterday we created a file called hop.php, and once we were done, our affiliate hoplink codes looked a little like this:

http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net/?prod=1

Today, we’re going to create a file called go.php which will bounce visitors to the correct hoplink from our site. The hoplink directs those visitors to hop.php back on our domain, and hop.php directs them to the correct sales page, wherever that may be. If the average visitor even had a clue how much jumping around they were doing in the background, they’d feel a little bit like Tigger. Fortunately it will generally be instantaneous and invisible to most users.
Read more…

A close friend of mine is using Clickbank to run an affiliate program for his product, but with the upcoming arrival of a second product he wants to promote via Clickbank, he ran into a problem.

Clickbank lets you promote up to 50 products, but you only get one hoplink for your entire account… that is, no matter how many products you have, the basic hoplink your affiliates will use will always land on the same page.

The three ways to deal with this limitation are:

1. Create a new Clickbank account for each product
   However, this would mean paying a $50 setup fee for each product, and would require logging into Clickbank multiple times to check sales and stats, and worrying about multiple Clickbank cheques each month.
2. Create an intermediary page with a link to each of the products he has available.
   It isn’t necessarily a bad idea to have a page like this, but requiring all prospects coming via an affiliate to go through an extra page before seeing the offer is bound to reduce conversions and cause confusion.
3. Use a script to create custom redirection to the appropriate products.
   This was the route that offered the best potential. I found a number of scripts that did exactly this, ranging from $17 to $97.

Read more…