Best Affiliate Line

I received this email from Maxbounty today.

?I am sending you this e-mail today to update you on MaxBounty’s position with respect to advertising on MySpace.

While we have been allowing affiliates to advertise MaxBounty campaigns through
their personal MySpace profiles with the provision that they were not phishing or
spamming other MySpace profiles, our recent efforts working with MySpace directly
has shown that too many people are breaking the rules. Coupled with the fact that
MySpace expressly forbids commercial activity of any type in their terms of service,
we have decided to change our position on MySpace advertising.

Effective immediately, MaxBounty’s affiliate terms and conditions will be updated to
prohibit advertising of any type through MySpace accounts. This includes, but is not
limited to, advertising via bulletins, comments, mail, profiles or any other area of
a MySpace account. Any affiliate caught violating these terms run the risk of having
their MaxBounty accounts terminated.

Looks like no more myspace promotion of Maxbounty offers, plain and simple. So if you did or use links you may want to remove them immediately.

If you are in the Ringtone market and regulate the digitalpoint forums you will have noticed there has been basically a bid war for people that promote the Mobile Sidewalk offer. Who said CP Network competition isn’t a good thing (Especially for Publishers).
First, Maxbounty was offering 13.90 for base payout on Mobile sidewalk and Azoogles‘ payout was lower, (I can’t remember their original rate). Then Azoogle decide to beat Maxbounty with a payout of 14.00. Of course Maxbounty counters with a 14.50 payout. Any of these payouts are great payouts for a Ringtone offer as most hover from 9.00 to 13.00.
Then Azoogle decided to make the jump and payout 15.00 per signup, and I went and checked Maxbounty this morning and they are now paying out 15.00 per signup also!
One thing to take note is both companies are offering different Ad Copy. So try them out and see which one works for your sites. This also shows you how much some networks are making off of these ringtone offers if they are able to raise that much. Just think when either network was paying out the lower base pay they were pocketing the difference, so I am sure both networks are feeling the squeeze on their profits from this offer.
All I have to say is competition in networks is a good thing! BUT I can almost guarantee that these high payouts from either party won’t last so get the money while you can. The last time Azoogle did a major increase in ringtone payout it was on Dada and only lasted a few weeks then took a 3.00 dive.? Both Maxbounty and Azoogle are great CPA Networks if you aren’t signed up for one or the other you are missing out.
If you have any suggestions or feedback feel free to leave us a comment.

One of the best ways to monetize a web site, and among the least known, is lead generation, which is actually a highly lucrative form of affiliate marketing, but is used by relatively few online marketers.

Here’s how lead generation works. Listen up - this information is golden!

Monetizing a website by becoming a CPA affiliate is very, very simple. You sign up with one of the 50 or so CPA Networks that are available online, drive traffic to the custom landing pages they provide, and get paid whenever a site visitor fills out and submits a form. That is really all there is to it.

A CPA network is a clearing house that brings advertisers and publishers together. The advertiser provides a custom landing page and form, pays the network commission for making it available to affiliates, and the affiliates in turn are paid for driving traffic and generating signups.

CPA stands for “cost per action”, and in this case, the action is the site visitor filling out the form. Compare this to traditional affiliate marketing, and you will see the beauty of it quickly. Done right, it is a much easier and more lucrative way to monetize a website.

A traditional affiliate must acquire traffic, do a good job of “pre-selling” the product, and send visitors on to the vendor site through an affiliate link, hoping to generate something like 1% to 5% sales, which in turn is highly dependent on the quality of the vendor’s sales letter and product. If the vendor does a poor job of selling on the sales site, or has an over-priced or poorly received product, the affiliate has spent a lot of time, and perhaps money, for very little return.

A CPA affiliate, on the other hand, has a much easier job of things. He or she must still acquire traffic, either by paying for it, or by putting together a well-optimized site that gets good search engine placement for certain key words. At that point, however, the CPA affiliate’s job is nearly complete.

The next step is for the site visitor to fill out a form requesting some sort of information. Keep in mind, this does not entail the visitor getting out his or her wallet, or making a decision to spend any money. All it entails is that the visitor *request free information* and give his or her name and email address, and perhaps a physical address.

You, as the CPA affiliate, get paid *even though your site visitor has yet to buy anything*. You are getting paid for a LEAD, not a sale.

Many people have no idea how huge and lucrative lead generation is, and not a clue the kind of money that certain businesses will pay for a good lead. Things like mortgage and insurance leads, in particular, are very, very valuable, as are credit card leads. But even something as seemingly inexpensive as a cell phone ring tone can bring you a nice commission per lead. Why?

These lead purchasers are planning on maximizing the long-term value of a customer. In the case of a mortgage, one lead can generate a commission of thousands of dollars to a mortgage broker. An insurance or credit card account is worth recurring commissions potentially for many, many years. Even a ring tone lead has a long-term value, since the vendor will continue to market to that person over and over again, selling them many times what it cost to acquire them as a customer.

CPA is big, big business, and one of the best ways there is to monetize your web site. If you are looking for easy and lucrative ways to monetize a web site, CPA affiliation could be your answer. To really do well at CPA, you need to learn how to use traffic generation methods like Google Adwords effectively, but in the long run, CPA is far easier and more lucrative than traditional affiliate marketing.

If you’re in a highly competitive niche where pay-per-click, clicks cost 2-10$ per click you need to do everything you can to improve the conversion ratio’s of those highly expensive clicks. As I’m rather new to Pay-Per-Click advertising I’m learning as I go probably just like a lot of you.

In checking my stats and watching my logs ( making myself crazy ) I found that certain days of the week never seemed to produce conversions. So I decided to stop advertising on those days and what do you know my conversion ratio’s and return went up quite a bit. I don’t know why but certain days of the week people like to click ads but not take action for a couple of my niches. With that said I was wondering if there were certain times of the day that leads didn’t convert. Now I’ve run a lot of BlackHat leads to offers in the past and being as it didn’t matter when what converted I had never looked into tracking at this level, sure wish I would have. Needless to say, times of the day made quite a difference and increased my return on investment even more.

If you’ve been following my blog you’ve probably read through my blog you probably saw the last script I put up on tracking which keywords convert for you. In wanting to check if things converted at certain times of the day the old tracking method I was using wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Because DirectTrack, which is the affiliate system Copeac, CPAEmpire and various other smaller companies I work with run on, doesn’t give you a time only a date. So we need to reinvent how we’re going to do our tracking. Rather then by keyword like in the last tracking script we’re going to track the specifics of every click to the database.

The general premise is that rather than having a keyword ID in the database with a count attached to it we’re going to track each and every click that comes through the site. And rather then having the keyword ID passed for the subid to match those up we’re going to pass the click ID. Then when we go to pull and analyze what converted we can see where the click originated, where the click came from, what keyword triggered it, what time it was, etc.

With this layout there’s going to be a tracking.php file that will be included in the landingpage.php file that will record the click and then return the id for the recorded click. Then that id will be replaced in anything that references the affiliate link.

Layout:

First we’ll have our file somelandingpage.php this is the actual page the user is going to be going to. Very simple for this example we’re going to just make it pretty much blank. We’ll just add a couple things so we can test things properly. Of course you can just add whatever you want to the page later or move the code to a real landing page.

<?
$site = “mydomain.com”;
include(”tracking.php”);
?>
<h1>My landing page</h1>?

That’s it! Let’s talk about what’s going on with somelandingpage.php.

First we’re setting the variable $site which will be used in tracking.php which you’ll find out about very shortly. This is going to be the value to track which site or page the click that’s being recorded came through. In our example case we’re going to use a fictitious domain, mydomain.com. So in the database the click will be recorded as coming through mydomain.com. This will allow us to track a lot of domains or pages in the same db. Something else you might do is if you’re split testing landing pages you can just setup two different ones then rotate between them and give them different site names. Then the clicks will be tracked for each page in the db.

Next we’re including the file tracking.php file which will be what we discuss next. If you don’t know, whenever we include a file that means execute the code in the file just like it was written in the somelandingpage.php file itself. It executes it inline just like it was in it. This allows us to make one tracking file and then include it in a lot of pages.

Then we close out the PHP code and put a little HTML just so we can see on the screen that that page actually loaded. The last line of the file is going to give us the link to an offer with the click ID for the click data we inserted. You’ll see how this works shortly. Just understand that we’re going to passing the click ID for the subid in the affiliate link. Then we can go back later and match up the subid on the conversions and match it up with the click ID to see everything about the originating click.

Now lets talk about the tracking.php file.

So tracking.php is going to be the file that’s included on the landing page. Now keep in mind if you have 100 pages on a site and you want to track each one all you have to do is do is set the $site=”site.com/thispage.html”; and include(“tracking.php”); then it’ll start tracking clicks on that page as well.

The gist of the script is

1. we connect to the db
2. we get some environment variables that are set by the server (ip address, referrer, useragent)
3. get data being passed in the url. I’m tracking keyword and source of the click. Now we could get the source through the referrer but setting it when we run our ads is a lot more reliable.
4. we insert the data we gathered into the database.
5. get the id of the record we just inserted.
6. remember the affiliate link in the previous file? Well now we just echo out the id into it where the subid goes and we have the click tracked in the subid. So if that click converts we can go back and see where the click came from, what time it was, what keyword it was. All important stuff wouldn’t you say?

<?
//connecting to the database we setup
DEFINE(’DB_HOST’,’localhost’);
DEFINE(’DB_USER’,’login’);
DEFINE(’DB_PASS’,’password’);

DEFINE(’DB_PRIMARY’,’tracking’);

mysql_connect(DB_HOST,DB_USER,DB_PASS);
mysql_select_db(DB_PRIMARY);

// Server variables
$ip = $_SERVER[’REMOTE_ADDR’];
$referer = $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’];
$useragent = $_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’];

// capturing data we passed in the url
//ie. http://domain.com/page.php?k=my+keyword&s=yahoo
// I’ve added the engine the click is coming from as
// I’m starting to branch out to other engines now
$keyword = trim($_GET[’k’]);
$source = trim($_GET[’s’]);

$sql = “INSERT INTO `clicks` (`keyword`,`source`,`ip`,`referer`,`useragent`,`time`,`site`) VALUES (’$keyword’,’$source’,’$ip’,’$referer’,’$useragent’,NOW(),’$site’)”;
mysql_query($sql);

$id = mysql_insert_id();

?>

Lastly here’s the Database structure you’re going to need. I created a new database called “tracking” and added the table “clicks” with fields for each data piece we want to hold. Here’s the SQL for the click tracking table:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `clicks` (
`id` double NOT NULL auto_increment,
`keyword` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`source` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`ip` varchar(15) NOT NULL,
`useragent` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`referer` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`time` datetime NOT NULL,
`site` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=22 ;

Now all you have to do is go and pull your advanced report from your directtrack based affiliate system. Or any affiliate system that supports SubId’s. And match up the subid’s on your conversions to your click ID’s. Then you know exactly what’s converting for you when.

Next post I’ll cover Building a table for the conversion records and how to automate pulling the data from the directtrack system to populate it. Also I might show you how to make a little system to see what Conversion ratio you’re getting for what words. The last thing which I haven’t implemented myself if finding what bids on words are costing, which could be referenced from reports from the ppc engines.