Chasing the dream… and finding out exactly what that means
Archive for April, 2006
Announcing the launch of Keyword Transformer
Apr 30th
I’m very proud to announce the official re-launch of Keyword Transformer!
If you have an interest in tools that automate the production of lists of keyword variations, it’s exactly what you’re looking for! If you don’t, it might still be worth a look at the sales page, just to study the techniques used. Launched yesterday, it has achieved an impressive conversion rate already. To release your own products is one of the easiest ways to make money if you can create your own products, as I’ve now found out!
I’m actually very excited about this, because it’s the first product I’ve launched that has an affiliate programme and is sold through a web site, and I’ve put it all together myself! 
I had a bit of trouble with the launch actually, which is why the product was re-launched. I’ll be writing about that in here soon.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
If you buy today…
Apr 26th
It’s gripe time for me, today. I don’t know about you, but I find websites that say “Buy before (insert tomorrow’s date) and you’ll get this special deal” rather irritating. The exception is where they are actually telling the truth, but that’s quite rare.
It’s all too easy for somebody to look at the source code for a page—virtually all browsers have this basic capability—and then see the tell-tale signs of a piece of Javascript code slotted in nicely where the date should be.
If you must use this tactic, at least use PHP or a similar CGI language to code your webpage, so that the user can’t tell you’ve done it. (Well, not without waiting a day, anyway.) Try to stick to honest deals and avoid telling porkies, especially if your buyers consist of a significant proportion of webmasters and/or programmers. If you say you’re going to raise the price in three days, do it, otherwise don’t do it at all.
If I see an offer along the above lines and I find out that you’re lying about it, you’re far less likely to convert me as a customer, because you instantly lose your integrity. I can’t be the only one.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Motivated Marketing System
Apr 21st
It’s time for another one of those deals where the price goes up and up the longer you wait…
This one will only be of interest to you if you have a product or products to sell, whether these are your own products or products that come with resale rights. It’s basically an affiliate marketing system that includes some sweet functionality, such as instant PayPal affiliate payments, one-time offers, and URLs that don’t look like affiliate URLs. The best thing is for you to view the sales page here:
The price will be going up at midnight on 25th April, 27th April and 30th April. I think the product is even worth the eventual $247 price, but it’s spectacular value right now!
I’ve bought it. I installed it in about half a day. It could do with better documentation, and it helps if you are reasonably technically minded. (Note: I am advised that better documentation and videos are in the pipeline.) I installed it with a little bit of difficulty that was caused by me rushing ahead and not reading the installation instructions properly! Also I had to remove the line starting php_flag register_globals 1 from the .htaccess file to get the program working on my web hosting service. Technical support advised me that this change does not affect the operation of the program. Now it’s installed, I will be using it for my new product launch, which as some of you know is a keyword manipulation tool for AdWords campaigns called Keyword Transformer.
If you buy the product through my link, as a thank you, I’ll give you a copy of my new Keyword Transformer for free when it’s released! I’m expecting to release the product early next month, but I have a beta version available now to anyone who buys the product through my link. You’re gonna have to take this on trust, but it’s a very useful program! It runs under Windows, probably 95 upwards. Email me at “dave at theaffiliatemarketer dot net” if you do buy through my link, and I’ll sort out your free extra bonus.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Make Money Promoting The Affiliate Marketer
Apr 20th
I appreciate links, because of course they mean more traffic! So how about this:
You refer people to the ClickBank News category of this website. It shows them the latest ClickBank products, using your affiliate ID in the link 75% of the time.
Now, if the person goes on to buy a ClickBank product through one of the links, there is a 75% chance that you will get the commission for it!
Tracking is performed by a cookie that has a one-year life, and as long as the cookie remains intact during that time, you stand to gain commissions on anything purchased by the user. I currently have several repeat visitors who access the main ClickBank News category page once a day.
Here’s how you do it! You can actually link to any page of this website, except for pages in the links section, and you add ?aff=<your clickbank ID> to the end of the link. For example, if I want to use my own affiliate link to send people directly to the latest ClickBank News, I construct the URL as follows:
http://theaffiliatemarketer.net/category/clickbank-news/ is the root URL, to which I add ?aff=davtom which is the name of one of my ClickBank accounts.
When the website is accessed with that URL, a 301 redirect occurs (see an earlier article about htaccess for more details) and the query parameter is swallowed up. This is when the cookie is set.
This does of course depend on people’s honesty to work, so I suggest that you only make use of free methods of promotion at your disposal, such as posting to your opt-in email list if you have one. Note that you are not allowed to link to this website using any unethical approach, such as unsolicited commercial email. Feel free to make use of any ethical method of promotion!
None of the links on this site contain my own affiliate link, and I do not email my own affiliate link to my subscriber base. I may link to this site in my signatures on forums from time to time, and these do contain my affiliate link. I believe that’s a fair approach.
In the spirit of honesty, I ask you not to click on your own affiliate link to the site, except that you may test the system out, in which case I ask that you delete the cookie created by your test afterwards.
Note that only ClickBank News posts made since 13th April 2006 will show your affiliate link.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Free Alternative to Camtasia Studio
Apr 19th
You’ve probably heard of Camtasia Studio. It’s an excellent tool for recording demonstrations of software, and it makes for a fantastic marketing tool because not only can you demonstrate a software product or web-based interface, but you can also inject enthusiasm into your sales pitch with your voiceover. The main problem with it is the price! $299 can be a lot of money to find. Of course, Camtasia would pay for itself given enough product sales, but it’s still a lot of money.
I’ve been researching this field for a project that I’m working on, and I’ve come across a free alternative to Camtasia Studio. The Windows Media Encoder provides the capability to capture the screen into a Windows Media video file (WMV). You can add your own voiceover, so it basically provides the same functionality that Camtasia provides. It also has other capabilities, like broadcasting a live event, capturing images from attached devices such as webcams, and converting files to WMV format.
The only problem that I’m aware of, and I understand that it’s not a problem with Camtasia, is that WMV files can only be played on PCs running recent versions of Windows such as Windows XP. It’s not a problem for me because I’ll be using the application to demonstrate Windows software, but it’s something to bear in mind.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Just in case you missed the AdSense Firesale
Apr 13th
All is not lost if you missed the recent AdSense Firesale! You can get one free AdSense site per month, just by joining the Ethical Marketers’ Club.
The crawl of my site by MSN’s search engine has begun! I find it quite exciting. I haven’t done much to promote the site yet: I have a reciprocal link campaign in operation, and I’ve written one article that I’ve submitted to various article directories. I’ve also added a link to my signature on a free forum that I inhabit, made a few (useful) blog comments to link back to the site, and I’ve set up one blog to begin promotion of the site. I’m sure it won’t be long before I make my money back through AdSense clicks, especially if the author’s statements are true! They certainly seem justified, although of course I don’t have the benefit of a PR6 link pointing at the new site.
If you haven’t already done so, why not give this approach a try? You can test out for yourself the quality of the sites, and see how well they work. They do need work; the articles included leave something to be desired, but they come with private label rights, so you can modify them yourself. You could even just take a bunch of articles from the directories and put them on the sites. AdSense Firesale 2 is undergoing development, and you need to form a realistic opinion of whether you would like to purchase it; the only way to do that is to find out whether you can make money from these AdSense sites.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Google to start charging for AdWords API calls
Apr 12th
According to an email from Google that I received today, Google will start charging for AdWords API calls from 1st July 2006. The charge will be a “nominal” US$0.25 per 1000 quota units consumed.
Google are also modifying the terms and conditions of use for AdWords API so that commercial applications such as AdWords Dominator can legally be used. The terms and conditions that apply from July can be viewed here:
The current quota system will be discontinued, and unlimited paid access to AdWords API will be provided.
Some people will be exempt from some of the new charges and terms. The only example offered is that those who design proprietary applications to advertise their own products will be partially exempt. Further details are to follow in June, when Google will be providing more details.
How does this affect us as affiliate marketers? I believe that it will have little effect on most affiliate marketers. Only those who have written in-house applications are likely to be affected, and the effect is unknown at this stage because they will apparently be exempt from some charges. I anticipate that the use of products such as AdWords Dominator will dwindle as charges are applied for their use.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Improve Page Rank with htaccess by chopping off the www
Apr 7th
If, like me, you’ve been promoting your website with both the www tag included and without the www tag, you’ll have been dividing your efforts as far as the search engines are concerned, because technically they are regarded as different websites. Using your .htaccess file on a server running Apache, you can recombine your Page Rank quite easily!
In my .htaccess file for the root of my domain (i.e. where I put myfile.html if I want to access it as [...].net/myfile.html), I added the following code to cause accesses to www.(domainname) to be redirected to (domainname), and the code required was surprisingly short:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^w+\.theaffiliatemarketer\.net$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://theaffiliatemarketer.net/$1 [R=301]
Note the following:
- The code makes up three lines. The first line starts with RewriteEngine, the second line starts with RewriteCond, and the third line starts with RewriteRule. This is how it must be written in your file. It is shown here word-wrapped.
- You need a backslash before each dot in the RewriteCond line only. This is because this line contains a regular expression, and a dot on its own means “match any character,” whereas a dot preceded by a backslash means “match a dot.” (If you don’t understand that, don’t worry; you don’t have to. You can just run with it.) You must not add backslashes before the dots in the RewriteRule.
- Using w+ rather than www means that this expression will work for www.mydomain.com, ww.mydomain.com, wwww.mydomain.com, wwwwww.mydomain.com
– basically any number of w’s. You might need to add subdomains for ww and wwww etc, and if this is the case then you would need to use the same rewrite rule in the root folders of these subdomains wherever the root folder differs. - If you already have a .htaccess file in this directory, adding these lines before any other rewrite rules should be OK. I’m not sure if it would work well if you have it after any other rewrite rules. RewriteEngine On only has to be there once. It doesn’t hurt to have it in the file more than once.
- Some web hosting providers don’t let you use .htaccess. It will only work for those that run Apache and let you use .htaccess. This usually includes Unix-based servers, but not Windows-based servers.
What it does is to tell anybody accessing the www URL of your site that it’s been permanently redirected to the equivalent non-www URL, and that includes the search engines, so if, like me, you’ve been promoting your web site with both URL variants, this will tell the search engines that the two web sites are one and the same, and will cause the Page Rank for links to both to be combined. I have read elsewhere that somebody else applied this tactic, and they started to get more traffic from doing it.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
How to backup your websites
Apr 3rd
I am aware of two websites that have recently been hacked! If you use scripts on your site, it can be quite easy for this to happen, unfortunately. It’s also possible that your web hosting service can have technical problems and lose all your files. You need to be prepared to deal with this situation by backing up your files.
There’s no need to buy any software to do it, either. Here is a free way to backup your websites on a regular basis. Get yourself a copy of wget. The software started out as UNIX software, but it is available for Windows here: WGET for Windows. Alternatively it comes with most Linux distributions, or you can install it as a part of Cygwin if you use that.
The wget program can mirror http and ftp sites. You don’t want to use it to mirror your http site; what you want to do is to copy the contents of the ftp access that you have to your web server host.
I use it in the following way, from a command line prompt:
wget ftp://<my-domain-name> ----ftp-user=<my-user-name> ----ftp-password=<my-password> ----mirror
It performs an incremental backup, so if you have a file on your backup directory that is the same as the one on your site, it will not be transferred. This mitigates against problems caused by excessive bandwidth use. The first time you run it, of course, a full backup will be performed.
Set up a regular schedule in Windows for the tool, perhaps once a week or maybe even once a day, and you’re done!
Note that MySQL databases, subdomain access lists and/or any other functions may require separate backup arrangements.
If you need any help to run this program, please leave comments on this post, and I will help you out with it.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer