This post is about how to create affiliate software for Clickbank vendors that allows affiliates to sends visitors to particular pages on the vendor’s site and receive credit, i.e. affiliate sales, for those visitors.

Now why would a Clickbank vendor want to allow this – could this be a Clickbank scam?

No, no, no.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  This is not a scam.  This is a way to let affiliates send visitors to the pages on the vendor’s site that converts the best (for that particular affiliate).

Or – hold on to your hat – even to the payment page (if the affiliate thinks a presell page on her or his site can convert better).

Let’s be honest, not every vendor has a sales letter that converts very well.  Why not let the affiliate do a presell and send the prospect to the payment page right away?

You can, and it is easy to do.

A simple change to the Clickbank vendor’s site information, a new page on the vendor’s site and you’re in business.

Clickbank Login

The vendor logins in to his or her account, clicks on the”Account Settings” link at the top of the page, then clicks on “My Site” and modifies the Hoplink Target URL.

Instead of having the URL be something like http://www.example.com, this gets changed to http://www.example.com/cb/

Affiliate Software

Time to make a slight addition to the vendor’s website that handles the redirect.

The vendor adds a subdirectory to the web page – in this case a directory called “cb” <- that’s what the vendor changed in the url information page at Clickbank.

Then creates a file called “index.php” and adds the following contents (similar to the following) to the index.php file

The index.php file gets uploaded to the cb directory.

Time out:  Going forward, let’s assume that you are the Clickbank vendor …

There are a few changes that need to occur to the content mentioned above.

The first and most obvious is to change the example.com domain to your domain.

The second is to modify the contents on lines 3, 4, and 5 to your information.

You can also add more pages to redirect to.  Just remember to add a unique number for each page.  For instance, you might add

4 => “http://www.example.com/someotherpage”,

And correspondingly, you can remove some of those pages.

Once this information is added to the index.php file, upload the index.php into the cb directory.

Done.

So How Does This Clickbank Affiliate Software Work?

Now it is time to inform your affiliates that they have options when they send visitors to your site.

Instead of simply sending visitors through an affiliate link that looks like this …

http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net

… and having them arrive at the page specified in your Clickbank affiliate account.  They can now send visitors to particular pages on your site (if you have multiple pages) using an affiliate link that looks like this…

http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/?page=2

or

http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/?page=3

Try it for yourself, here are some live links that will direct you to a particular page and the affiliate will receive affiliate credit for any sales that result even though the arrival page isn’t the first page the visitor sees.

http://dwooding.linktator2.hop.clickbank.net <- this takes you to the home page

http://dwooding.linktator2.hop.clickbank.net/?page=1 <- this takes you to the member’s page

etc.

Even Works With Encrypted Links

Here’s the same links as before, this time encrypted using Clickbank’s Hoplink Shield.

http://7d24386lp1okql28mjqdcduk65.hop.clickbank.net/ <- this takes you to the home page

http://7d24386lp1okql28mjqdcduk65.hop.clickbank.net/?page=1 <- this takes you to the member’s page

But Wait, There Is An Easier Way

Here’s a simple form to fill out that will create the directory and file you need to upload to your web site to allow Clickbank affiliates to direct link to ANY page (well, there is limit of 3 pages in this case … try out the premium version for all pages)  on your site and still receive affiliate credit.

What are you (you the Clickbank vendor) waiting for, try it out.

This is perfect if you want to be able to watch your visitors in real time without having to do anything.  Anything besides setting up anyway.

Start by downloading the Putty program.  This program will allow you to login to your web server and view your visitors in real time.

Once you have downloaded the program to your computer, you will see a screen like this.

You will need to know your web server’s I.P. address.  Type the I.P. address into the text box that says Host Name (or IP address), make sure that Port is set to 22 and Protocol: has SSH selected.

Click on Open and a black screen will pop open prompting you to provide a username.  For *nix type servers (Unix, Linux), the username is almost always “root”.  Type that in.

Next provide the server password.  The server password is typically NOT the same as your web site control panel login password.  Contact your tech support if you are not certain.

Next, you will want to change directory (cd) by typing at the prompt:

cd /usr/local/apache/domlogs

Now you want to move into the web site specific subdirectory.  The next subdirectory will be the username of the website you are interested in.  For instance, if your web site domain is mywebsite.com, your username would typically be the first 8 letters of your domain, in this case mywebsit.

cd mywebsit

The next command to use will display the latest visitors to your website and include information like I.P. address, referrer (if available), time / date, page, browser type, etc.

tail -f mysebsite.com

Everytime a page is visited on your web site, Putty will update the display to show the latest information.

When you are doing watching the show, hit the Ctrl-C keys and you will be kicked out of the real time visitor stats.

Ctrl-C

When you want to totally get out of Putty, type “exit” and the Putty program will shutdown.

exit

The video shows you where to download putty (hint, go to google and type in putty), how to configure Putty (takes 30 seconds if you know your web server’s I.P. address and password), how to change directory and what to type in to view your web site’s visitors in real time.

This handy plugin takes a feed (rss or atm format) that you provide the link for and posts the contents on your self hosted Wordpress blog.

Here’s what you do to use WPomatic.

Download the wpomatic plugin

Visit the download page (or download the “fixed” version I provide … keep reading) at worpdress.org, extract the contents to your computer, then upload the plugin to your plugin directory on your web server.

Setup the plugin

Login to your Wordpress blog, click on plugins, Activate WP-o-Matic, click on Settings->Wp-o-Matic and go through the 4 step setup.

The setup includes testing that your web server has all of the necessary components for using this plugin.  Setting up a cron job to run the script on a scheduled basis (or letting a page load of your blog kick off the script).  I don’t recommend using the page load option as it might slow down the page load for the person visiting your site.

Add campaign

Now you are ready to add your first campaign.  Click on Add Campaigns and you are presented with tabs that say “Basic”, “Feeds”, “Categories”, “Rewrite”,  and “Options”.

Basic

Select a title related to the subject of interest.  This will also auto insert the same information into the campaign slug text box.  Leave the Active? option checked.

Feeds

You will need to provide the url of an rss or atom feed.

As an example, go to Google’s blog search and type in a keyword phrase.  Once results are returned, you will want to get the address of the feed associated with that keyword phrase.

You can use either the Atom or the RSS feed address.

wpomatic

You can find either of those two links on the left side – copy either link.

RSS link should look something like this:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=iphone&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

The Atom feed looks like this:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=iphone&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=atom

Take one of the two feed addresses and paste into one of the four the Feed URL text box under Add Campaign.  You could also add more feeds and WP-o-Matic will “blend” the results when it posts to your blog.

Categories

I recommend using the Quick Add option to create a category with the exact same name as the keyword phrase you titled this campaign with.

Rewrite

Skip unless you want to get fancy.

Options

Change the default frequency to fit your needs.  I typically change the Max items to create on each fetch to something less than 10.  Check the box for Post title links to source to give credit to the original source.  For discussion options, I typically choose Closed and uncheck the Allow pings option (just my preference).

Now Submit.

Done

That’s is how you setup your first wpomatic campaign.

Once you clicked on the submit button, you were given the message that said Campaign added successfully.  Edit it or fetch it now.

Click on the fetch it now link.

What happened?

Unfortunately, you probably received a message that said Campaign processed. 0 posts fetched.

So what gives, you would expect up to 3 posts to be made, but zero?

There is a piece of  code missing.

If  you are willing to mess around with some php code, then dig into the wpopmatic.php file and include the htmlspecialchars_decode command.

If you would rather skip the editing, at the end of this post is a download to the fixed version.

If you are interested in more details, the following video shows what was described previously.

[6:30] – the problem – wp-o-matic does not properly format the url.

[8:30] – the solution – edit line 1011 in the wpomatic.php file and add htmlspecialchars_decode to the line that formats the url.Or, save yourself the explanation and download wpomatic with the fix.

Here’s where you can download wpomatic plugin with the fix.

Setting Up Your Datafeed

Like I said, this is going to be a working example, no theory here, of how to use Adwords with a datafeed. Trust me when I tell you it is not all pretty. There is some ugliness involved when adding a vendor’s datafeed to the mix – “goofy” characters being the biggest offender. You’ll know them when you see them. For this example, I am going to use a datafeed I have previously used, one of the most content rich datafeeds I have found on ShareASale – the Nature Hill’s datafeed. If you want to follow along, head over to ShareASale, login or signup if you aren’t a member already, then grab the NatureHill datafeed. Once in, find the Nature Hill’s program and click on the link that says “Download .csv”. You’ll need to download the file and extract it to your computer. Next, upload the extracted file (4742.txt) to your webserver in the directory of your choice and possibly change the permissions on this file (chmod).

Good coders create, great coders reuse

.. or something to that effect. I tell you this because I found a site where someone has done a great job setting up a database and importing the datafeed just like we want. Like I said, good coders create, great coders … But before we do that, we need to create a MySQL database, user, and password. You’ll also add the user to the MySQL database. When everything is said and done, your MySQL information should look like this if you are using CPanel: Back to the script. Of course, it won’t be right if I didn’t hack up the script a little bit, now would it. Remember how we have already uploaded the merchant’s datafeed file, in this case 4742.txt, to our webserver. Since we have already done that, we can chop off the ftp portion of this script and simply start by reading in the file. Plus, we need to add a little something extra to cleanup the title (Name). The final script looks like this: Note well the “REPLACE” comments – that is for you to specifically change, in particular your ShareASale id ($sas_id) which is a number provided by ShareASale, database user, database password, and database name. Typical information might look like this: Now that we have all of our “supplies”, it is time to start building a …

Search Script

… that is “smart” enough to display results that your visitor would be interested in. I already have in mind how my Adwords campaign will be setup so I know what this PHP search script needs to do. Now, for the purists out there, you’ll recoginize that what I am about to show is a “hack”. Not a pretty way of accomplishing what I want to do, but it works. If the database I am using was much larger, I would probably run into performance problems. The idea behind this is that I am looking for items whose Name matches ANY of the keywords provided by the user via an Adwords click. If someone is looking for “apple trees”, the search script will return results that have either “apple” or “tree” or both in the Name of the database field. And being the money grubbing mongrel that I am, results will be returned with the most expensive item displayed first As a fall back, if there are no matches in the Name (title) part of the database, the search script will make a second pass through the database looking in the Description part of the database for matching items. If that returns no results; well, I’ll figure something out by the time we get to the end of this article. We will start by creating a snippet of code that parses through the keyword or keywords and creating a sql query statement. This code assumes that the keyword(s) is passed from another script (which it will be using since we are using dynamic keyword insertion with Adwords). Line by line: 3) Grabs the keyword(s) passed from another script, chops off the whitespace at the beginning and end (if there is any), then strips out any tags (html type) to prevent any “junk” from being passed in. 4) Take the keyword(s) and break them up into individual words, shove them into an array. 5) Loop through each keyword. 6) Make sure the keyword is not empty. 7) Build a portion of the sql query needed and keep appending for each keyword. 10) Once finished with each keyword, chop off the extra “||” from the end. This is the conditional part of the yet-to-be-displayed sql query needed for searching the database of affiliate products.

Lets Query

If you look up at the original script shown (you don’t have to, trust me on this one), we named our table naturehills. Lets define a variable with that value. Now create a sql query that uses that variable and the $extra variable. Our search script now looks like this: Lets move along and show what the script looks like with the sql statement and looping through the results (along with our backup plan if we don’t get results the first time). Save this as “search.php” Notice I have added some MySQL stuff at the top to connect to your database. For where we are now, I am simply having the script print out the Name if it finds a match. If there are more than 30 results, the script stops returning results. The $count keeps tracks of how many results; if there are less than one result after the first sql query, the search script then changes the query from looking in the Name field to looking in the Description field ($extra = preg_replace(”/Name/”, “Description”, $extra);). To be honest, I don’t expect that the Description option will ever be triggered. Why? Because of the way I will setup my Adwords campaign that uses the datafeed Name as keywords. But just to be safe the script will include the backup query. Almost forgot my money mongering ways, add this to the sql statement to return results by most expensive to least expensive: That’s the basis of our search script, we will fill it out later to present the results in such a way that results are included in a template to display for our visitors. Moving right along.

Creating Adwords Keyword Groups

We are going to query the database that contains our datafeed information, grab all the names, and build a keyword group for EACH keyword that we can dump into the Google Adwords Editor. We could always group our keywords by another field in the datafeed, either Custom1 or Custom3, which shows which groups each Name fits into. Since I don’t know if I can count on these fields being populated at a later date, I’ll opt not to use these.

The result from running this script is a textarea box filled with ad groups that consists of one keyword per ad group with the campaign name “CAMPAIGN” that looks like the following.

I recommend you do a search and replace and give the campaign (”CAMPAIGN”) name something else. Then copy the results.

Google Adwords Editor

If you are not familiar with the Google Adwords Editor, download it here.

Next, go over to your Google Adwords Editor (I’m making the assumption that you have figured out how to set this up). Click on “Keywords”, then click on “Make Multiple Changes”, choose Add/Update Multiple Keywords.

Next, for the Destination option, choose the radio button that says “My keyword information below includes columns for campaign and ad group names. (These columns should be first, and in this order.)”.

Paste the results. Click on “Next”.

Some keywords might be ignored for duplicate reasons.

Complete the information required under the Ad Groups and Campaigns tabs before posting this new campaign to Adwords.

Under Campaigns, you will need to set a daily budget.

Under Ad Groups set a Max. CPC Bid (USD). Finally, click on the Ads tab, click on the Add Text Ad and add an ad for the newly created camgain (that was a mouthful).

NOTE WELL the liberal use of dynamic keywords  THIS IS IMPORTANT  and is the heart and soul of the whole operation – in particular the destination url.  If you are not familar with dynamic keyword insertion, check out the post I made about this.  http://www.davewooding.com/google-adwords-dynamic-keyword-insertion-php-script/

That’s it for the .htaccess file.

Template For Results

For this, I will leave up to you, dear reader, to come up with a decent looking template that displays results the way you want them to look like.

I’ll show results using a basis template that relies on subsitution for presenting unique content.

Create a file called “template.html” that contains something like this:

I know, I know, very boring. I’m sure you can come up with a much better looking template. You’ll probably want a Terms of Service page, a privacy page, an About page, a contact page, etc.

Notice the %%whatever%% things, those are “tokens” which will be replaced with a value that the search script uses … a value that is pulled out of the database based on the keyword sent over from Adwords.

A Better Search Script

Remember our php search script from earlier? We are going to modify it to log the keyword(s) along with the date/time, and I.P. address of the visitor along with printing out results that use the template.html page.

Lets start by creating another table in our MySQL database called “visitors” that includes date, I.P. address, search term. Here’s the SQL dump to create.

Tracking Keywords And Clicks

Ah yes, tracking. How could we possibly forget that. You may have noticed I sneaked in a page called go.php in the results that get printed out. That is a PHP script that (1) dumps the search search term into a database and logs the time, I.P. address of the visitor, the keyword that brought the visitor to the site, and the link that was clicked.

Now we just have to create it.

First, another MySQL table called “clicks” that logs the date, visitor’s I.P. address, keyword used to arrive and link clicked.

And our go.php script to log the click and redirect to the vendor:

http://www.davewooding.com/adwords/go.phps

Adwords driven, datafeed generated content

That’s all she wrote. Hope that helps you get your head wrapped around the idea of using a datafeed with Google Adwords.

Someone claiming to make $5,000 a month posting a link on google. Typically the site is Someone’s first name Money Blog, in this case the person is “Mary”. It could easily be “Jay Wilson” or “Greg Williams” or “Cory Jordan” or “Jonah Battle”. All of them seem to be able to Make $5000-$10000+ a Month Posting Links on the Internet. Good for them.

What I don’t understand is why they all seem to have the same friends. When I say friends, I mean people who comment on their blog about how much money they make. They show the same images: faces with checks in front showing how much money Google has paid them.

Seems a little strange, but come on, $5,000 a month for anyone with a computer and basic typing skills can earn cash on Google. From the sounds of this, this should a slam dunk.

Mary Steadman from San Jose, CA had a compelling story on how filling out one simple online form changed her life. She told me how she lost my job as a boring account rep for a manufacturing company a few months back, then changed her life by getting Google Biz Kit, Internet Biz Kit (have to have both, this is key), posting links given by Google, then finally depositing the checks that Google sends.

The links Mary provided lead to here:

By now, the frenzy is building, I’m thinking qualifying shouldn’t be that difficult. I mean, I have a computer and basic typing skills and the form that needs to be filled out seems like a no brainer.

Just as I thought – I qualify!

And this is where it ends.

I know, I know, I’m only “one click away” from making up to $943 a day on Google, but they want my credit card information.

Sure, it is only a $1.97 for shipping.

But nowhere up to this point is a “full disclosure” of what exactly am I getting.

I was surprised (maybe I shouldn’t be) not to find any earnings’ disclaimer. No where in the process of signing up did I find out if the results mentioned were typical or not.

I back tracked a little – went back to Mary’s Money Blog, the cached version anyway – and found a disclaimer. It certainly wasn’t easy to find and I wouldn’t expect the typical web surfer to notice this. Why? Because it was commented out and did not show up on the web page!

For those interested in what the commented out terms and conditions along with disclaimer says …

This publication provides the Author’s opinions and neither the Publisher nor the author intends to render legal, accounting, financial, business or other professional advice with this publication. With regards to licensing of a business enterprise, any legal accounting or tax matters. Author and publisher is an Affiliate of the company offering the business opportunity and are remunerated by advertiser. Author and publisher strongly suggest that the reader seek the services of appropriate licensed business, financial and or legal professionals before proceeding with any actions and comply with the local, state and federal licensing and guideline requirements which the reader resides or conducts business.

The Publisher and Author disclaim any personal liability, loss or risk incurred as a consequence of the use and application of the offer, either directly or indirectly, of any advice, information, or methods presented in this publication. Individual comments are unedited and not the opinion of Author or Publisher and not liable for their comments and opinions. Author or Publisher is not associated with Google Inc.

*INCOME CLAIM WARNING: Testimonials do not result typical result. Photographs or images are depiction of individuals and payment methods. These income examples are representative of some of the most successful participants in the program. Some individuals purchasing the program may make little or NO MONEY AT ALL. These claims are not a guarantee of your income, nor are they typical of average participants. Individual results will vary greatly and in accordance to your input, determination, hard work, and ability to follow directions. No person or company can guarantee profits or freedom from loss. By using this website you are agreeing to our Earnings and Income Disclaimers

(c)2005 All rights reserved. No duplication in whole or in part of this system s allowed without prior written authorization.
By using this site you are agreeing to our: Privacy Policy – Disclaimer – Terms of Use

So, here I sit $5,000 a month poorer for not signing up for the opportunity that Mary Steadman from San Jose has successfully used.

Dave

P.S. – Seems that there are people out there that doubt the legitimacy of Mary Steadman’s opportunity – like the Electron Plumber.

P.S.S. – For those willing to do some good old fashion work, there is opportunity to get paid by Google – click here to find out.

P.S.S.S. – Getting a little more traction, Aaron Wall has written about “Google Money“.

This post is no exception.

I have joined The Keyword Academy.

I have gone through a few of the videos, taken notes and done what has been recommended.

The video that follows shows a little bit about the program and what I have done to automate some of the work involved. These guys make no bones about it, there is some work to do – from picking the markets to target, selecting the best keywords to target both in terms of most profitable and keywords that have the most chance of success.

It is one thing to find a high paying keyword (like mortgage or lose weight), but it is another to find a high paying keyword that you can actually get a site ranked for. Court and Mark give you the exact formula to follow.

If you are a DIYer (do it yourself) that wants to boot strap yourself to making money online – these are the keys to the kingdom. If you are willing to put in the time researching the keywords and markets to target, then building the content on Wordpress blogs, and building the backlinks needed to rank at the top of Google, then you will get everything you need … and just as important, an explanation why you should do things the way they teach.

I spent a good portion of yesterday following the instructions on how to determine if a particular keyword is worth competing for. Most of the high paying keywords are not worth the effort. The good thing about putting in the “grunt work” is that I start to see patterns occur.

It is called Articletator.

I’m planning on having a working version ready very soon.

Here is a ten minute video demonstrating what it does so far – and the code that generates the results.

Articletator Video

The idea is you search for a keyword phrase of interest, tell the script how many results to get and where the results come from.

Articletator goes off and does its thing – grabbing urls of sites that provide the information of interest, parsing out bits of information relevant to your query and reporting back the results in an easy to use format.

There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Darren Rowse made a post about split testing Google Adsense and showed how to do so using channels and a little javascript.

Like a lot of things, there are other ways of accomplishing the same thing.

Enter PHP, that fancy web scripting language that gives you the ability to do some pretty neat tricks.

The code snippet below allows you to split test your Adsense by day. Instead of having to setup separate channels to split test, just login to your Google Adsense account, create two versions of the Google Adsense code you want to test, paste those two versions into the PHP code shown below, put that PHP code in an include file on your site, and call that include file in your web page. Then, if you want to see how you are doing, go back to your Google Adsense account and look at your results by day.

O.K. maybe that was a lot of stuff to do.

If you have a PHP enabled web site and you are not using PHP includes, tsk, tsk.

All of the even numbered days (even numbered according to PHP) will display one version of your Adsense code while all of the odd numbered days will show another version of your Adsense code.


<?php

?>


The most important part is the “if” statement, the code that checks whether today is an even or an odd numbered day.

In this PHP example the “z” represents the day of the year.

The date(”z”)%2 < 1 checks if today's number modulus 2 is less than one (which asks if today is an even numbered day), then do whatever is between the set of squirly braces - the "{" and "}" - else do whatever is between the next set of squirly braces.

The whatever I am referring to is display your Adsense code.

By the way, there is nothing to prevent your from putting anything between the squirly braces.

There are some limitations to be aware of for sure. Namely, you still need to generate two versions of the Adsense javascript code to include on your web site. Also, if you want to get a better understanding of your results, you will need to download the results and group the data by even or odd day. I don’t even know if Google allows for an easy way to get your Adsense results – I’m not even going to login to find out.

But, for a quick and dirty way of split testing your Adsense results, this PHP code will do the trick.

Extra: You don’t have to just use the day of the year (”w”), you could just as easily use day of the week (”w”), hour of the day (”G”), day of the month (”j”) – or some combination. Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can … oops, that’s for a different topic

So do I , so do I.

That image you see above has been “spoofed” – its a fake.

Sure, I took it from my account, then I threw a little javascript at it and manipulated the appearance. Makes you think I took the first half of the month off from promoting products, doesn’t it?

It better not.

Hopefully, you don’t fall for this type of hype that promises the moon … and delivers nothing but hot air.

That’s why I am pleased to say “Black is Back”

The Affiliate Black Book is available for purchase.

Like a breath of fresh air – if you want to get into the mind of a genius that shows you some killer strategies, then I suggest you purchase this now.

I’ll even “incentivize” you, I’ll provide access to one of my killer little scripts that makes it easy for your to increase your sales … and does so in “X” fashion.

Purchase the Affiliate Black Book through my link, hit the CONTACT page and let me know you purchased (let me know your receipt number) and I’ll give you access to this script.

Heck, even if you don’t purchase, lets have a little fun here.

The first person that replies in the comment section and knows EXACTLY what this script does will get access to the script regardless.

I’ll give you a little hint … most affiliate programs use these?

Lets see how the comments go, I’ll add hints as needed.

The important points are:

- Your article needs to be a text file, for instance, “rose-bushes.txt”.

- The text file needs to be named EXACTLY like you want it to appear on your site. If your text file is “rose-bushes.txt”, then the page that gets displays your article on your site is “http://www.example.com/rosh-bushes.html”.

- The text file needs to be in the same directory as THE SCRIPT.

This short 3 minute video shows you how to upload a text file using a FTP program (I use SmartFTP)

Click here to see the … CLICK HERE >>> article video.

And as an added bonus, the last 30 seconds include some music from the a movie of the 1970s. Enjoy.