Let’s start with a few stats. Not counting this post, I have 1048 posts, which comes out to be about 210 posts per year, or just under 18 posts per month. Oddly enough, that’s pretty close to the 20 or so working days there is in a month. My output’s decreased quite noticeably in the last year or so, mind you, but for a while I was pretty much posting something once or twice a day.

Comments… There are over 3000 approved comments. I currently have 2400 pending comments, but most of those are spam (both out-and-out spam but also lots of “I like your site!” and “Keep up the good work!” and “Nice article!” type comments) and I’ve gotten into the habit of blowing away the entire pending comment pool when it gets too big to navigate… Lots of commenters are showing up lately because the blog is near the top of list of “dofollow” blogs and everyone’s trying to get a nice juicy link from a PR4 page back to their site. Too bad I moderate all comments… if you don’t have anything worthy to say, don’t bother commenting!

I can’t say this blog ranks highly for many keywords in Google. For “adsense” it’s around #70. Even though I have a fair number of inbound links (about 50,000 according to Yahoo!), only about half of the pages on this site are actually in Google’s index and only 400 or so of them show up when you do a “site:memwg.com” query. There are different reasons for this. One is that the site’s been hacked numerous times — I took out some injection code just yesterday that was putting lots of links for popular pharmaceuticals into my pages. It’s also been losing link velocity — the speed at which incoming links are made — because I haven’t been updating it very much lately. And I don’t have a lot of deep links into the site, which is another problem — most of the links are directed at the root of the domain.

Anyhow, in part 2 we’ll actually start the retrospective by looking at 5 things I’d wish I’d done different from the beginning.

Installation

Installation is simple, just copy the index.php file shown below (after modifying it slightly) up to your web hosting service. If you’re doing EzineArticles-friendly domain serving, install it in the root of the server, otherwise you can just create a new folder and install it there. For example, I might create a folder called “burnthefat” and place the index.php file in there. Any subsequent access to “http://www.mydomain.com/burnthefat/” would invoke the script and do a redirection.

Before uploading the script, be sure to modify the default $affiliateid and $vendorid values. They are currently set to ‘egiguere’ (my primary CB affiliate ID) and ‘burnthefat’ (the vendor ID for Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle). Set them to appropriate defaults. You can override these settings when invoking the script. (If you’re planning on using the domain with EzineArticles, you MUST set the affiliate and vendor ID values correctly because you can only link to the root of the URL with no parameters.)

Now this is totally optional, but you may also want to add these lines to a .htaccess file that you place in the same directory as the index.php file:

<Files *.log>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

These lines ensure that no one can download the .csv files the script creates — you’ll have to fetch them yourself using an FTP client. (Like I said, optional…)

Tracking EzineArticles and Other Sites

The script looks at the referrer header and tries to build a tracking ID that incorporates part of the domain name and some kind of unique identifier. For EzineArticles, for example, it uses the “id” field (the article identifier). So you can easily tell which article of yours generated the click. It looks for “id”, “C” (which is used by GoArticles) and “kw”. You can easily modify it to look for other things.

The tracking ID generated in these cases consists of the date and time (in MMDDHHSS format — 8 characters long, i.e. “03091347″), some portion of the domain name (i.e. “ezineartic”), and the article ID (i.e. “672234″). So when you see this show up in your ClickBank report:

03091347ezineartic672234

you’ll know the click came on 13:47 on March 9 from EzineArticles article #672234.

Tracking AdWords Clicks

The script has some built-in features for tracking AdWords clicks, but only if you use a special syntax in your destination URLs, like so:

http://www.yoursite.com/?ag=rf01&nw={ifsearch:s}{ifcontent:c}
&kw={keyword:none}&pl={placement}

This is what the values mean:

• ag — an identifier for the ad group or whatever unique thing you want to track, i.e. if you have two different ad texts you might want to assign two different values here
• nw — the network being used. Note the special “{ifsearch:s}{ifcontent:c}” syntax. On the search network, the value will end up being “nw=s”, on the content network it will end up being “nw=c”. This is how you tell where the click comes from.
• kw — the keyword that triggered the ad, if known, or “none” if not known.
• pl — the website the ad was featured on if it’s shown on a third-party site.

As you see, you can pack a lot of information into the destination URL. The script will store all this information in the CSV files it creates and it will use it to create a tracking ID. The tracking ID will start with the date (MMDDHHSS as before) followed by “aw” (for “AdWords”), followed by one character for the network (“s” for search, “c” for content, “u” if unknown), followed by the ad group (the “ag” value), followed by as much of the keyword (the “kw” value) as will fit. (Tracking IDs are limited to 24 characters, remember.)

Other Sources

If the script doesn’t have enough information to create a (semi)human-readable tracking ID, it generates a random number and prefixes it with the date (in MMDDHHSS format) and uses that as the tracking ID.

Overriding Affiliate and Vendor IDs

You can set the affiliate ID and vendor ID explicitly by using the “affiliateid” and “vendorid” query parameters, as in:

http://www.feedthemuscleburnthefat.com/?vendorid=4idiots

This is useful if you want to use the same script for multiple redirections.

Analyzing the Data in Detail

The tracking IDs the script creates are meant to be easily eyeballed in the ClickBank sales report. But if you want to know more about the context of a particular tracking ID, the script stores information in simple CSV (comma-separated value) files that you can easily download and load into a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel. A separate file is created for each day, so the clicks for March 8, 2010 are found in “clicks.2010-03-08.csv”, in the same folder as the index.php file.

So when you see a click in your ClickBank sales report and you want to know more about it, look at the first 4 characters of the tracking ID to extract the month and day to know which file to download and open in Excel. The following data is stored, in this order:

1. The full date and time
2. The tracking ID
3. The final affiliate ID
4. The visitor’s IP address
5. The full path that was requested, including any parameters
6. The referrer URL, if any
7. The user-agent header, if any (useful for discerning robots from humans)

The Script

Here it is. Either download this text file or copy the text below; place the text into a file called index.php and copy it up to your webserver.

<?php

//*************************************************************
//
// ClickBank Tracking Script
// Version 1.0
// Copyright 2010 by Eric Giguere
// ericgiguere@ericgiguere.com
//
// You may use this script for free on as many sites as you want.
// You cannot sell this script or otherwise claim ownership.
// This script is provided as-is, no warranties are implied.
//
// For installation instructions, see
// http://www.memwg.com/clickbank-tracking-script/
//
//*************************************************************
// Modify these values to set your affiliate ID, the vendor ID,
// and any additional data (i.e. '&page=1928') to append to the
// final hoplink after the tracking ID.
//*************************************************************

$affiliateid = $_GET['affiliateid'];
$vendorid    = $_GET['vendorid'];
$extra       = $_GET['extra'];

if( empty( $affiliateid ) ) $affiliateid = 'egiguere';
if( empty( $vendorid ) )    $vendorid    = 'burnthefat';

//*************************************************************
// You shouldn't need to change anything below this point.
//*************************************************************

// Gather information about the visitor.

$ip       = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$browser  = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$request  = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$reqtime  = date( 'Y/m/d H:i:s T' );
$logfile  = 'clicks.' . date( 'Y-m-d' ) . '.csv';
$prefix   = date( 'mdHi' );
$source   = '';
$tid      = '';

// Check query parameters to determine if we are being called
// from AdWords. If we are, gather the requisite info. If not,
// try to figure out where we're being called from using the
// referrer header.

if( !empty( $_GET['kw'] ) || !empty( $_GET['ag'] ) || !empty( $_GET['nw'] ) ){
    $nw      = strtolower( $_GET['nw'] );

    if( strlen( $nw ) != 1 ){
        $nw = 'u';
    }

    $source  = 'aw' . $nw;
    $keyword = $_GET['kw'];
    $adgroup = $_GET['ag'];

    $tid = substr( $prefix . $source . $adgroup . makealphanum( $keyword ), 0, 24 );
} 

// If we weren't called from AdWords, check the referrer header and
// see if we can suss out an identifier of some kind and combine it
// with the domain name to create a tracking ID.

if( empty( $tid ) && !empty( $referrer ) ){
    $referrerparts = parse_url( trim( $referrer ) );

    $host = ( $referrerparts['host'] ? $referrerparts['host'] :
               array_shift( explode( '/', $referrerparts['path'], 2 ) ) );

    $params = parse_query( $referrerparts['query'] );

    $hostparts = preg_split( '/\./', $host );
    $tld = count( $hostparts ) - 1;

    if( $tld > 0 ){
        $domain = $hostparts[$tld-1];
    $ids = array( 'id', 'C', 'kw' );

    foreach( $ids as $param ){
        if( !empty( $params[$param] ) ){
            $source = makealphanum( $params[$param] );
        }

        if( $source ) break;
    }

    if( !empty( $source ) ){
        $tid = $prefix . substr( $domain . $source, -16 );
    }
    }
}

// Last resort: we weren't able to create a tracking ID, so
// generate a unique string to server as our ID.

if( empty( $tid ) ){
    $tid = substr( getfaketid( $prefix ), 0, 24 );
}

$afflink = 'http://' . $affiliateid . '.' . $vendorid .
           '.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=' . $tid . $extra;

header( "Location: $afflink" );

// Write out the data to our CSV file

$fp = fopen( $logfile, 'a' );

if( $fp ){
  fputs( $fp, logmsg() );
  fclose( $fp );
}

//*************************************************************
// Functions used by the code above...
//*************************************************************

// Convert the string to a lower case alphanumeric-only string

function makealphanum( $str ){
    return ereg_replace( '[^a-z0-9]', '', strtolower( urldecode( $str ) ) );
}

// Parse a query string into its constituent parts

function parse_query( $var ){
    $var = html_entity_decode( $var );
    $var = explode( '&', $var );
    $arr = array();

    foreach( $var as $val ){
        $x          = explode( '=', $val );
        $arr[$x[0]] = $x[1];
    }

    unset( $val, $x, $var );
    return $arr;
}

// Encode URLs for saving in the CSV file by converting
// quotes and commas to URL escapes.

function csvencode( $str ){
    $str = str_replace( '"', '%22', $str );
    $str = str_replace( ',', '%2C', $str );
    return $str;
}

// Create the line of CSV data to append to the log file

function logmsg(){
    global $request;
    global $ip;
    global $referrer;
    global $browser;
    global $tid;
    global $reqtime;
    global $afflink;

    $msg = "$reqtime,$tid,$afflink,$ip," . csvencode( $request ) . ","
         . csvencode( $referrer ) . "," . csvencode( $browser );

    return $msg . "\n";
}

// Generate a fake TID with the given prefix.

function getfaketid( $prefix ){
    return uniqid( $prefix );
}

?>

Final Thoughts

OK, user-friendly this isn’t, I admit it. It’s very geeky. But if you’re even a bit technically inclined you should be able to install this script and use it. If you have questions about it, please leave them as comments here rather than mailing me, it’ll be more useful for others.

ClickBank Tracking IDs

As I explained last time, a ClickBank tracking ID is any combination of up to 24 letters and numbers. (It used to be limited to 8 characters, which made what we’re doing here a bit harder to do, but still possible if you were clever.) The tracking ID is appended to the ClickBank hoplink (affiliate link) and passes through ClickBank’s system. If a sale is made, the associated tracking ID (if it was set) shows up in the affiliate’s sales report.

For example, here’s a hoplink with a 5-letter tracking ID:

The tracking ID actually shows up on the ClickBank payment page as part of the affiliate ID. If you click the link above and go through to the payment page, you’ll see this at the bottom:

You should always test your affiliate links to make sure the tracking ID is being passed correctly.

Note that tracking IDs are not case-sensitive, i.e. “ID001″ is the same as “id001″.

What To Track?

So what should you track? Here are some ideas:

• Date — Knowing when your affiliate link was followed is valuable information. Sometimes the sale happens days or even weeks after the initial visit. For example, if I refer someone to the Rocket Spanish product, they may first sign up for a free 6-day Spanish mini-course before purchasing the full course. So a click that occurred on (say) February 15 might generate a sale a full week later. If I’ve changed promotional methods in the meantime, I might mistakenly attribute the sale to the new promotion, when in fact it was the old one that actually worked.
• Time — Knowing the time of day can also be useful if you’re promoting products via AdWords ads. If the majority of your sales happen late in the day, you can turn off bidding for the other parts of the day and reduce costs by avoiding the tire-kickers.
• Geolocation — The IP address of the visitor can be mapped back to a geographic location. As with the time, this information can aid you in targeting your ads. (See my article What A Website Knows About You.)
• Referrer — When you click a link, browsers normally send the URL of the originating web page (the page the link was on) to the web server. This is called the “referrer” or “referrer header”. Examining the referrer (which the user can prevent the browser from sending, so don’t count on its presence) can tell you the source of that particular click.
• Additional Information — You can embed additional information in the link. For example, AdWords has a keyword insertion feature that lets you automatically insert the keyword that triggered the ad click into the destination URL.

This probably covers 99% of the things you’d want to track via a ClickBank tracking ID.

How To Track?

So how do you track all this information? You can stuff a lot of it into the tracking ID itself, which is my favorite way of doing things. You have 24 characters to work with, so let’s see how we can encode things:

• 4 characters for the date — 2 digits for the day, 2 digits for the month. (Don’t bother with the year, because that only matters at the end or beginning of a year and you should be able to figure out what year the month and day apply to.)
• 4 characters for the time — 2 digits for the hour, 2 digits for the minute.

That takes 8 characters of the 24, leaving us 16 to work with. We could track IP addresses (they can be encoded with 8 characters quite easily) but there’s no point doing it because ClickBank’s sales reports include the buyer’s country.

What can we do with 16 characters, then? How about extracting some useful information about the referrer. Clicks from EzineArticles include the article ID in the referrer URL. Clicks from search engine traffic include the keyword term. Clicks from AdWords ads can also include the keyword term (if you use the special {keyword} syntax in the destination URL) and even information about whether the click originated on the search network or the content network. The possibilities are almost limitless.

Here’s another tip: any information that can’t be stored in the tracking ID itself can still be stored in a file or database.

If there’s interest, I can post a simple tracking script that generates ClickBank tracking IDs with some of this information in it.

You declare that you will not send in any articles with direct affiliate links in them. We reject articles with direct affiliate links. It is ok, however, forward/redirect to an affiliate link from the top-level of a domain name you own.

In other words, if you have a domain “foo.com” it’s OK to include a link (in the resource box only) to the URL “http://www.foo.com” or the URL “http://foo.com” if that URL immediately sends the visitor to an affiliate link. But you can’t link to any other page on the site that does the same thing — only the root page of the site is allowed this exception to the “no affiliate links” rule.

Why does EzineArticles have this rule? It’s about quality. A lot of sites that embed affiliate links in their pages are of dubious quality, and EzineArticles tries very hard to only link to quality sites so that it can keep its high page rankings. (The human-based vetting of articles that is central to its design is a big reason why EzineArticles is seen as an authoritative source of content by the search engines.) It also requires some effort and commitment on the part of the article author, who has to purchase a domain name to use as a forwarding service.

Easy Redirection With PHP

Your domain registrar can automatically forward any domain you own to a URL of your own choosing, but there some advantages to doing the EzineArticles-friendly domain forwarding yourself. And it’s not hard to do at all as long as your web hosting service supports PHP (which is pretty much everyone).

Let’s say I want to promote a ClickBank product called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, a very legitimate ebook about exercise and weight loss. I start by purchasing an appropriate domain, in this case feedthemuscleburnthefat.com (no, it’s not very creative). I want to set up the domain so that anyone who clicks on a link to feedthemuscleburnthefat.com is automatically forwarded to burnthefat.com using my affiliate link.

All I do is create a file called index.php using a text editor like Notepad. Four lines is all I need:

<?php
$afflink = 'http://egiguere.burnthefat.hop.clickbank.net';
header( "Location: $afflink" );
?>

I place this file on the web server and Bingo!, visitors get automatically redirected to the official Burn the Fat site.

You can do the same with your own site, just replace my affiliate link above (set in the second line of the script) with your own affiliate link.

302 vs 301 Redirects

The nice thing about the redirection method above is that it sends a “302 Moved Temporarily” redirection command back to the web browser and not a “301 Moved Permanently” redirection command. This difference is important. You’ve probably heard that you should use a 301 redirect whenever you move or rename a page so that search engines will update their indexes (and Google will pass PageRank). That’s correct, but this is not the time to do a 301 redirect. You want a temporary redirection.

Why? At some point in the future you may want to replace the forwarding with your own landing page. Any links that you’ve accumulated to the site will start passing PageRank to the new index page, not to the vendor’s page like it would with a 301 redirect. That’s why setting up your own domain to promote an affiliate product using a temporary redirect is an easy way to promote an affiliate product via article marketing without having to set up a “proper” site.

Conversion Tracking

It doesn’t take a lot of work to do a bit of conversion tracking with the PHP script shown above. ClickBank, for example, offers a “tracking ID” or “tid” feature. Here’s what ClickBank says about tracking IDs:

Tracking IDs are short descriptions you create that are added to the end of your HopLinks. The Tracking IDs can be up to 24 characters long, and must consist only of numbers and/or letters (no punctuation or other symbols). When a sale is made using one of your HopLinks, the Tracking ID is passed into ClickBank’s reporting, so you’ll be able to see exactly which of your promotional efforts led to the sale. Your Tracking IDs are visible only to you, so the vendor you send customers to won’t be able to view your Tracking IDs.

To use a tracking ID, just add “?tid=xxxxxx” to the end of your ClickBank affiliate link, replacing “xxxxxx” with the actual tracking ID.

Adding a tracking ID to the redirection script shown above is done by changing the second line of the script:

<?php
$afflink = 'http://egiguere.burnthefat.hop.clickbank.net?tid=ftmbtf';
header( "Location: $afflink" );
?>

Now when I get a sale for “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle” I can look at the tracking ID column in the ClickBank reports and when I see “ftmbtf” I’ll know the sale came through my feedthemuscleburnthefat.com domain.

Next I’ll show you how to modify that script to make the tracking even more precise.

• Reduce the number of posts on the home page — I was showing the last 20 posts on the home page, so I’ve cut that down to just a few. (This will help with the home page, but not the site in general.)
• Add a caching plugin — Try installing WP Super Cache or some equivalent.
• Clean up the database — There is a MySQL database associated with your blog and it gets filled with unnecessary stuff as your blog grows. Install the WP-DBManager plugin and use it to optimize your WordPress database.
• Disable unnecessary plugins — I had some old plugins that I wasn’t using. Disable them. In fact, if you’re truly done with them, delete them entirely from your wp-content/plugins folder.
• Switch to a faster theme — Not all themes are equal when it comes to load times. Experiment with a few different themes to see if you can find one that works better for your site.
• Remove unncessary JavaScript — Is your blog full of JavaScript from various bookmarking sites and so on? Get rid of as much of it as you can.
• Upgrade your WordPress — Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress to take advantage of any speedups that have made it into the platform.
• Increase the PHP memory limit — Try adding more memory to PHP by setting the memory_limit property in your php.ini file to a larger value. If you don’t have a php.ini file, ask your hosting service to create one for you first, then modify it.
• Increase the database timeout — If you’re seeing a lot of “500 Internal Server Error” messages with your WordPress blog, especially when you’re accessing the administration pages, your database connection may be timing out prematurely. You’ll see this on shared hosting services a lot of times. I found a great post on robsnotebooks.com that shows how to do this and even provides a way for WP to automatically reconnect to the database if the connection is dropped. I had to modify the wp-db.php file for use with WordPress 2.9, though, so if you want a copy just drop me a line.

If none of the above tips work for you, it might be time to switch hosting services, or move away from shared hosting to a more dedicated solution. But that’s a whole different enchilada!

I also took the opportunity to make a couple of other changes to it:

• The minimum refresh time between updates is now 5 minutes, down from 15 minutes.
• The word “AdSense” is spelled correctly throughout the user interface. The old “Adsense” spelling always drove me nuts

To install my modified version of the AdSense Notifier, which I’m calling version 1.0.0, please uninstall your current version (go to Tools -> Add-ons in your Firefox menu), restart Firefox and then click this link:

Install AdSense Notifier 1.0.0

You’ll be prompted to allow the install to proceed, so please do. Then another restart and you’ll be good to go. Your settings should be saved during this process.

If you have any problems, let me know.

• You can’t change the article in any way (this includes changing any links or inserting your own links)
• You must attribute and link to EzineArticles
• You can only republish 25 articles per domain, with a 250 article maximum across all domains, per calendar year

See the publisher terms of service for full details on what you can and can’t do.

Of course, not everyone follows or respects these rules. Also, these rules don’t apply if you contact the author directly and get permission from them to republish their content.

You are free to add content before and after any article you republish, and to embed your own ads. It helps if you can make the content unique in some way. Some AdWords advertisers use articles like these to help improve the score of their landing pages.

If you do a lot of searching of content from EzineArticles, consider purchasing my Article Gatherer software, currently at version 1.1.1. It find, downloads and formats articles for you, making it easy to republish the articles in a WordPress blog or on a website.

In the meantime, here are some more articles I’ve written recently:

• Sanitize Your Online Profile Before Applying For A Job — Simple advice about cleaning your online footprint before going for that job interview.
• Understanding the BlackBerry Ecosystem: BES vs BIS — The difference between BES and BIS, useful if you’re a Blackberry developer.
• Your New Year’s Resolution — Write More Articles! — What I’m trying to do!
• Every Business Needs A Domain Name — Why your business needs its own domain name.
• How To Setup Your BlackBerry Development Environment — What you need to download and install to get started with BlackBerry application development.
• Privacy Policy Basics — What is a privacy policy and what should it include?
• AdSense Privacy Policy Requirements — What should AdSense publishers include in their privacy policies?

Yeah, I’m keeping busy with article writing. Even upgraded to an EzineArticles premium membership to get the faster feedback and acceptance times.

One of the better paid keyword tools is Micro Niche Finder. You can read my short Micro Niche Finder review for more information about what’s included in the tool, plus access to the free videos that the creator of MNF, James Jones, has published in order to show his tool in action.

Micro Niche Finder costs $97, which isn’t cheap by any means. I know, because that’s the price I paid for it! If you’re interested in purchasing the tool, though, I’m happy to sweeten the deal if you buy it using my affiliate link: I’ll give you a free copy of Find Me A Domain, the easiest domain name finder you’ll ever use. See my Micro Niche Finder bonus page for details of the offer.