Guest posting is a great opportunity to generate backlinks to your site. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions. Looking forward to hearing from you.

hanji

We believe that transparency of referring URLs is vital to assessing traffic’s quality. For example, if an advertiser books outdoor billboards, they see where those ads appear and we believe the same should be true of Affiliate Marketing! It is therefore important to make sure your websites or tools are sending accurate referring URLs to eBay when traffic is passed through affiliate links. If we notice a high percentage of your traffic is not showing referring URLs, we will need you to resolve this as only a small percentage should be blocked by browsers. Soon we’ll be posting a series of tips on the blog that can help ensure your referring urls are being passed to our system.

This is a little troubling since I’ve been redirecting EPN clicks back to my website and then directing those clicks to EPN via PHP’s header() function. This makes all of my links appear that they’re all links within my site.

I’ll be doing some tests today to see how I can provide them with referrer info while maintaining my current system on EPN storefronts.

I primarily say this because, if you have followers and they’re no way related to your profile, you will not be able to attract them to offers or to your sites. They won’t care and eventually unfollow you anyway. If you have targeted followers, they’re more likely to see what you have to say and follow some of your links, etc.

Here is a graph from TwitterCounter showing my followers from the last 3 months

The large spikes are directly related to my BirdFeeder integration. I wrote a review about BirdFeeder recently, and I can’t say enough about how powerful this tool is. It is truly a great tool, and obviously gets the work done. As I mentioned in the BirdFeeder review, this is not just a ‘follow’ tool, but a tool designed to follow targeted tweeters, based off of search criteria or individuals.

Today for example, I started seeing ‘Warnings’ about undefined variables related to a eBay API processing script. This variable is defined when the server successfully communicated with eBay’s API and it then fills a array. The array was never created, yet, there were no errors with the API communication? This was odd, so I started to do some debugging.

I ‘echoed’ the response and saw the following:

Ah, so my authToken had expired. I didn’t even know they expired. Logging into eBay’s developer area, I saw that the token expired yesterday (7/11). The bottom line, is that I have many sites communicating to eBay using the API system there, and if I didn’t monitor my logs, I would have missed this. I’ll be re-writing my API function to alert on Ack=failure to avoid this. Normally, I was just looking at ‘complete’ failure in the communication string.

A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

This was the saying generally for people to stay healthy by avoiding things that make you sick, be it lifestyle and behaviour or what you put into your body. This saying really applies to security as well.

I’m currently a web developer and server administrator, so I have a background of security. I’ve seen things when they’ve gone ‘bad’. I’ve also seen the damage that can be done to your business and way of life when a security breach directly affects you. To say a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure really applies to internet security. This topic can fill a book, but I’ll try to keep it short and cover some basic points, from a affiliate marketer point of view.

Platforms
It seems like most affiliate marketers are using various application platforms like WordPress, Drupal or BANS, etc, etc. These tools are great. They’re free (open source) and are easy to install and configure. The problem is that since it is open source any one can download a version and reverse engineer or scour the code for potential security holes and vulnerabilities. From there, a attacker would only need to Google a specific ‘footprint’ to find the same application and version to attack.

The damage this can cause is catastrophic. A attacker could gain priviledge of the entire server and have access to all of your sites. If you’re running dedicated servers, this is even more of a threat, since you would be managing the server and the attacker would recruit this server as a potential tool in his bot army. If you’re on a shared environment, the hosting facility will most likely shut down your site and stop services for you until you correct the problem.

Normally when exploits are discovered the author of the application (WordPress, etc) would be notified, and their developers would create a fix and release a update to correct this issue, usually in a extremely timely manner. Plugins are outside of the WordPress relm, so I would recommend plugins that show ‘activity’ and a community or development team that actively works on it. Stale plugins could be a security vulnerability.

The ounce of cure in this case… UPDATE YOUR WORDPRESS PLATFORM AND PLUGINS! It is so simple and easy.

I know I’m focusing on WordPress in this example, but this would be applied to any 3rd party software application or platform.

Services
If you’re running a dedicated server you must stay on top of your service updates, specifically PHP, Apache, MySQL and SSH. Just like in Platforms, these are all open source products and have potential bugs or exploits that are discovered at times. Either work with your hosting provider or perform the updates themselves. Depending on your flavor of Linux there are various ways to perform these updates.

I’m only mentioning Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) since you don’t see a lot of Windows based hosting at affordable costs. Plus.. I hate talking about Windows.

ACL (Access Control Lists)
This is something that is not mentioned often out there, but I really feel strong about. Using firewalls (iptables, etc) to manage access to your dedicated server is important. Limit SSH access to certain IPs (assuming you have a static IP at your home or office.. which you should). Along with SSH access to the servers, I also like to limit access to administrative areas and control panels. No reason these should be open to the world. This includes my wp-admin access as well.

Hardening Services
There are certain items you can do to ‘harden’ services. Basically making PHP harder to hack or limiting access to the system with a chroot, etc. Along with that you can control error messages (don’t display error messages) to prevent information disclosure. Usually attacks start with information gathering (finding versions, file path info, etc).

Passwords
Work on your passwords. Make them difficult. Think in pass phrases and include alpha numeric characters. DO NOT USE THE SAME PASSWORD FOR EVERYTHING! The more important the information, make the passwords more difficult. For instance, I don’t want people guessing my domain registrar passwords, etc. Think defensively with passwords, watch out for potential insecure Twitter applications, etc. 75% of people use the same password in other areas, so your Twitter password, could be quite valuable if you’re one of the 75%.

Okay, so those are a few items (many more actually while I’m thinking about it), but I wanted to talk about some worst case scenarios.

I had a client that was working on affiliate marketing. He was primarily working with AdSense and creating review and community sites (forums, etc) and was doing quite well. Some how a hacker was able to get is FTP password for the site and infiltrate his host. He had a dedicated server and was then locked out of all of his sites. My client also used the same password for his registrar and the hacker was able to take control of his domains.  This was when I was called in. The hacker tried to ransom the sites asking for $100K to return control of all his domains (over 100).

My client was able to start piecing over some of the domains, and even had the FBI involved. Unfortunately, the hacker was in Asia and little could be done. About 3 months later the client was able to get his domains back, but had to create a new hosting solution. After the client recovered the domains, the hacker began a very brutal DOS (Denial of Service) attack on his domains in a last stand type move, but the damage was severely done.

While the hacker had control of the domains, he was PMing invidivduals in the forums and causing mass havoc and confusion. Lots of members left, not to mention that the hacker probably stole all of there user credentials and emails. My client was also ranking very high in Google, and with content changes (pornographic and exploit software) he lost rank and had to start it up again. He also lost his AdSense account and had to re-apply and explain the situation. It was a major blow to his finances but he was able to recover  after about 6 months.

So the lesson? If he worked on his password management, this would have been avoided. A ounce of prevention, is worth a pound of cure.. or at least 6 months of cure.

I found a offer that looked good. It pays $5 per sign up (first page). There were a few things I wanted to see in the offer.I personally want it to be a ethical product or service. Something I feel that I can stand behind. I look at their lander and form submit. If it looks professional, I feel like I can promote it better. After selecting the offer, I wanted to create a landing page for it. I already have a ‘generic’ .info domain that I thought I would use. I like to use subdomains for managing offers to domains so I made one that works. I would check with TOS on the offer, some business (ie: eBay) will only allow names after the 3rd slash, so a subdomain with ebay in it would violate that.

I was going to outsource the landing page, but I wanted to get my feet wet first before throwing more cash at this offer. If this works, I might outsource additional landing pages. The reason I want to outsource is strictly to save time. I created a landing page that somewhat matches their theme on the form page. I don’t want to throw visitors off when they go from my lander to the form submit or destination site.

I looked into keyword tracking, mainly tracking 202, but decided to roll my own for now. I think I’ll look into that in the future, but for now, I just wanted to get something up. I wrote a simple function that would parse inbound keywords from Bing, AdWords or YSM and add it to the sid from Hydra on the redirect.

All that was left was crafting the ads. I decided to promote this in YSM initially since I’m most familiar with YSM Yahoo Search Marketing and already have other campaigns rolling there. The ad text used were basically provided by the offer company for emails. I figured they’ve been working on their ad text, so I would start with those. I made five ads. Keywords were then selected to match my offer and submitted. I initially bid the keywords at .40, but later up’d that amount to .60.

To date, I only have one conversion, but oddly, hardly any clicks for the keywords. I believe it is due to the high competition related to the offer. I’m currently working on more keywords and long-tail keywords to help my ad position.  PPC with offers is definitely different than with the storefronts. The next step will be to jack the keywords higher to see if clicks increase. I will also try to promote on Bing.

No matter what this is a great learning experience, and I’ll need to keep pushing forward. I’ll be sure to post any updates on my PPC to offer efforts. If you have any tips or suggestions, please feel free to comment!

The 4-Hour Workweek is a great read or listen. There is some fluff and hype, but the core concepts are very ground breaking yet simple. In a very small nut shell, this books discusses the idea of freeing your time by removing the distractions in your day to day work life. How to prioritize tasks, and how to deal with fears that you’re purposely avoiding.

This book hit so many nails on the head it was unbelievable. There were a few concepts that I really took to heart. I’ll be paraphrasing, but the concept of creating tasks solely to avoid tasks that you don’t want to do, or are afraid to do. Another concept is the idea of picking up tasks to “stay busy” versus being productive. I’m definitely guilty of all of these things. It also teaches you to “unplug and reset” your brain. Since many distractions are related to our need for information and communication, it stresses the idea of going “off line” so to speak. Reading email on a extreme limited basis, avoiding meetings, etc to free up your time to do the “hard” things in a timely manner.

This book isn’t about being lazy and working only 4 hours a week and being wealthy, it’s about prioritizing time and maximizing your time to be extremely productive, which in turn will FREE up time for fun stuff.

As a affiliate or internet marketer I thought this book was very informative and informational. I’m starting to realize how some of the solutions listed in the book can greatly improve my situation. Some are scary or difficult, but I will definitely give them a shot. I was pleasantly surprised by how inspirational this book is. Seeing things in different view point (talking about the ‘new rich’ vs. the old rich), is a perfect example. If you’re look for some motivation, I would recommend this book. “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” by Timothy Ferriss.

Basically, using cURL, you can bring in the RSS feed or XML feed. The RSS feed only includes date and status, and the XML feed will give you additional information including profile information (website, bio, etc).

I wrote a simple custom function which I’ve used in other examples here on the site called send_request(). This calls the request for the RSS file.

This function can be on the same script or in a include file. Next we need to assemble the querystring to send to our function. The function will return the XML which we parse with simplexml_load_string(). I should mention that this script will work with PHP compiled with simplexml and have cURL extension. If you’re using PHP4, you’ll need to use a different method to parse XML using DOM.

It looks through the RSS result and displays the contents to the browser. Let me know if you have any suggestions with this script or if you have any problems. I’ll be more than happy to help.

This add on is absolutely great. You simply highlight some text on the page you’re visiting and click on the Tweet Fox icon on the upper right hand corner of your Firefox browser. I small pop up application window will appear with the text you highlighted in the edit box. You can add additional text to your tweet, and add the shortened link to the site.

Once you’re all ready, you simply click the “Tweet” button, and the tweet will be posted to your profile. You can manage your various Twitter accounts as well. I’ve been having a blast posting sites I’m visiting and tweeting my own posts. I highly recommend this add on.. it’s great!

You can read more about Tweet Fox here.

Many affiliate marketers have skills that others lack. Skills that are valuable to other internet or affiliate marketers but also skills that go beyond this field and into the standard workings and requirements of the internet itself.

To me, a internet or affiliate marketer is a entrepreneur that is trying to find opportunities to make a living solely by their own means. No bosses, no schedule but based only on the desire of calling their own shots.  As of now, I’m still not a full time affiliate marketer, but I am a full time entrepreneur. I’ve owned my own web development business for five years, and I added affiliate marketing to the business as a way to diversify. And now I’m want to make that a focus. But you could definitely look at it the other way. Affiliate marketers should definitely look at selling services to make a few dollars to diversify your income streams.

Looking at the freelance service, I was thinking that many marketers, could do simple coding project, or design work, or content writing that has nothing to do with the affiliate marketing field and make a few dollars during down times. Also this could provide networking opportunities or potential niche research with the clients you’re working with.

I already mentioned Wealthy Affiliate’s Jobs area that provides a venue for programmers and designers to be hired within the affiliate community. Digital Point might be another place to look for these opportunities. Freelance sites are all over the internet and could be a wealth of opportunity.

The bottom line, diversity is very important be it niches or affiliate strategies, but diversifying your income stream could save your bacon.