Surf the Mind

Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

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 the rest of this entry »

As the end of August approaches I suddenly realized I’ve been terribly negligent about this blog for the entire month. But bringing myself to blog while the weather is still warm and the days are still long seemed to be just a little short of impossible.

But before the month is up, I want to point you to a few products.

First, The Wealthy Blogger has posted that he’s raising the price of his very cool Google Subscribed Links Toolkit for WordPress in a few days in order to start his affiliate program. If you want to grab it at $14.99, do it now!

Secondly, if you haven’t yet seen Market Samurai, you ought to give the trial a run. It is a very, very nice piece of market and niche analysis software for the price.

Neither product is linked here with an affiliate link. They get the nod on their own merits.

Just a quick note to say that The Wealthy Blogger has released his Google Subscribed Links Toolkit for WordPress.

It is absolutely awesome. The plugin is newly coded, designed for 2.5.x WordPress blogs, but is backwards compatible so if you’re still running a 2.3.x blog it will still work like a dream.

Aside from the plugin, the kit contains complete instructions from install to setup of your feed on Google. It simplifies a complex process quite well, and warns you when things might take a while to happen so you don’t panic and think you’ve done something wrong.

It also includes 10 nice 125×125 pixel banners that you can use to promote your subscribed links on your blog. That’s handy because the size of the banner Google offers is in a size that is probably a little awkward in many blog designs. 125×125 is quickly becoming the size of choice, especially for a lot of probloggers.

The toolkit also includes an AWESOME report offering five brilliant ways to get people running to subscribe to your Google links. These are five REALLY good ideas.

The price is cheaper than dirt, so if you’ve got a WordPress blog, it’s something you should be jumping at. I’m sure you’ll find it worthwhile.

Click here to check out the sales page.

I promised some results in my last post about Adsense Shield. I’ve been slow to write, not only because I’m on vacation, but because I’m not sure WHAT to report.

In case you haven’t read the last post, Adsense Shield is a script that is supposed to protect your Adsense site from clickbomb attacks… where someone clicks on your ads over and over in an attempt to get your Adsense account shut down. I set the script up on one of my sites to see if it affected overall Adsense earnings.

First of all, I haven’t noticed a drop in clicks, CTR, eCPM, or earnings for the site I added the code to. So, if it is working to protect my site from Adsense clickbombing, it’s not having a detrimental effect on revenue at all.

I do feel weird that it’s a piece of software I can’t really test once its installed, since doing so would mean I’d be clicking on my own ads. So, I’m trusting that the absence of error messages is a good sign and the script is working on my pages as well as it did on the test page.

Now that I’ve seen that it doesn’t decrease revenue, I’ll probably add it to my other sites when I’m back from vacation. I’m not at all sure how it’ll work on a WordPress blog, but I’ll figure that out when I get to it.

I’ve been thinking, lately, about the possible ramifications of a rival or pissed off friend sabotaging my life by clickbombing Adsense links on my site.

It’s not that I regularly annoy my friends (I hope!), but there are certainly a few burned bridges in my past.

So, I was happy to find a solution when I Googled for possible solutions. I was even happier when I saw that AdSense Shield was free.

I’m going through the documentation now, and my understanding of the script is that it shows Adsense until the user clicks on one of them, after which the ads on your page are replaced by something other than Adsense — whether it be YPN ads or something you create yourself.

I’m going to install it on one of my sites tonight at 2am, when Google switches to the next day’s stats, and I’ll report on how and if it affects my earnings after a few days.