CBTool Blog

Something that might be of interest – how to convert FLV files to AVI.

Yep, I’m not updating this blog very often, am I?

White Shadow :: Jul.02.2008 :: Rants :: No Comments »

I’ve created a plugin for WordPress that can cloak links in your blog posts and pages. Read more and download the plugin here.

Features

• Choose what to cloak – all links, only the links you specify or no links at all.
• Choose where to cloak – posts, pages or both.
• Configure the URL – you can set the “prefix” part of the URL (see examples below).
• Exception list – links pointing to domains in this list will not be cloaked. For example, this is useful if you have chosen to cloak all links but don’t want to cloak the links to your own domains.
• Compatible with all browsers – the link cloaker plugin doesn’t use JavaScript so it will work even for visitors that have disabled JS.
• “Smart” cloaking – relative, ambiguous or malformed URLs will not be cloaked. Better safe than sorry.

Get it here

White Shadow :: Jul.28.2007 :: Rants, Tips & Tricks :: 2 Comments »

I’ve seen people saying that adding a RSS module to your Squidoo lens is beneficial because it automatically delivers fresh content and helps with search engine rankings. I agree that a relevant RSS feed can be useful to visitors and can make it look like the page is regularly updated.

The RSS module is unfortunately useless for SEO purposes because search engines simply won’t “see” it. This Squidoo module displays the feed using JavaScript. As a rule, search engines don’t understand JavaScript and will not detect any contents in the RSS module.

I hope this helps clear some misconceptions about SEO-ing Squidoo lenses. Finding a relevant feed and placing a RSS module on your lens is still a good thing to do; just don’t expect it to help with your Google rankings.

White Shadow :: Jul.10.2007 :: Tips & Tricks :: 1 Comment »

Squidoo has modules for various merchants (e.g. Amazon) but it doesn’t have a module for ClickBank. I’m a programmer – kind-of – so I after looking at the Module Development Kit I wondered whether I should go ahead and try to create the module. After some thinking I realized it would take a lot of work and that there already was a somewhat usable workaround for getting dynamic CB ads on your lens.

It’s quite simple – just use RSS. You can place a RSS module on your lens and configure it to use a keyword-based RSS feed that you can create with one of the many ClickBank RSS tools. Some of them are even free to use. One advantage of this approach is that you’ll get to keep all the profits from affiliate commissions (This may vary with the RSS provider. Some might use their CB ID for a certain percentage or links). If it was a separate module you’d have to split the profits with Squidoo.

On the other hand using a RSS feed has it’s disadvantages (some specific to a certain RSS provider and some common) –

• Ugly titles and descriptions. If the RSS provider uses the marketplace title/description, you’ve got a problem. Those descriptions are often aimed at affiliates, not buyers. Someone visiting a lens on dog training won’t be impressed by an ad stating “This converts at 10%!!”.
• Weak keyword matching. Some sites will return more relevant results than others and more results overall (e.g. CBMall is better at keyword matching than CBTool. Yep, I’m criticizing my own site )
• No product images or screenshots. This problem can’t be reliably solved by a computer at all because vendors are not required to provide a snapshot of their product. Someone would need to manually specify an image to use for every single product.
• Unneeded complexity. You’d need to find a good RSS feed provider, create an account with them and figure out how to configure the feed instead of simply setting up a module.

Personally I think it would be much better if someone who has already solved most of the abovementioned problems wrote a module for Squidoo. This would give lensmasters more options to choose from as you could use RSS, the ClickBank module or neither. The guy who runs CBMall (Jeff Mulligan) would be a good candidate for creating the module – CBMall has a good search engine and usable product descriptions. There’s also a lot of contextual ad scripts designed to show ClickBank products. A script like that could be reworked to function as a module on Squidoo.

I’m surprised no one has done it yet. The module’s author would likely get a good deal of traffic and recognition.

As a final note, I think it would be great if CBMall offered a RSS feed for search results (with some randomization maybe?). It would probably work better than most existing CB RSS feeds for the purpose of getting visitors to click.

White Shadow :: Jul.05.2007 :: Clickbank Stuff, Rants :: 1 Comment »

By now I’ve seen hundreds of sales pages and many of them use some cliched tactics that tend to annoy me unendingly. Evil, e-e-e-e-v-i-l tactics (imagine a deep, scary voice). Well, do they at least work? Since everyone is using them I assume they probably do. Sales pages aimed at marketing professionals might (should) be an exception as the intended audience is probably well-aware of the techniques and won’t be impressed.

Here’s a list of some of these sales-page techniques –

1. Shock Tactics And Insults (The Rich Jerk)
   “If you don’t buy my e-book you’re going to feel so stupid, you miserable, poor dumbass! Observe my ridiculous earnings and despair, ye frail mortals!” Et cetera. If you play this right, it can be very effective in evoking an emotional response (emotion -> action -> sales…?). It doesn’t matter whether the reader buys the product because of excitement and anticipation or because of greed and shame. Right?
2. (Unlimited) Limited Time Offers
   There’s nothing wrong with limited time offers as such – it’s a valid marketing strategy. However, I have more than once encountered pitch sites that say “this incredibly low price only available for the next XX hours!”. Maybe they even have a live countdown there or something. If you don’t buy it and come back a few days later… suprise! – “…for the next XX hours!” is still there, counting down to some arbitrary time in near future.
3. Out of Stock Downloads
   “Only 2 copies left!” Sounds kind of strange when the product being sold is an e-book or downloadable software. Not enough bytes left to reprint your product, eh?
4. “They” Don’t Want You to Know This…
   Then there are the “dirty secrets” and “killer techniques” that “the Big Canines don’t want you to know”. I mean, all of the “Top Felines” use them and I had to “practically steal” these pages of priceless information from them so I could sell them to you. I’ll even let you in on some “guru” tricks and give you the opportunity to “spy” on … stuff.
5. Metaphors And “Style”
   If a product is 98% similar to other products in the same niche or simply a retelling of well-known truths it can be hard to sell it. Then it’s time to give the product a unique style or brand. Sometimes the author/copywriter goes a bit over-the-top. I’ve seen Ninjas (more than once) and Space Monkeys being injected with cash. Lets not forget the outdated blackhat stuff. I wonder if zombies and pirates are forthcoming?
6. Is Product X a Scam?! (And The U-Turn Tactic)
   Often used to attract visitors to a review of some product, the advertiser initially creates the impression he didn’t like the product and later turns around and endorses it wholeheartedly. While it is actually possible someone disliked a particular product and became a convert later do to recognising the product’s true value, this is usually not the case with most of the reviews.
7. From the Desk of Jon Smith…
   I know, I know – giving the visitor a name improves credibility. Still, it’s not a damn paper letter. It’s not a letter at all! Letters are delivered to the addressee and, on some level, they are personal. The sales page on the other hand is publicly available and compels the faceless visitor to approach it.
8. This Is A Complete Success Blueprint…
   Enough said.
9. Bonuses Worth $1437.95?…
   If a product costs $47 and I’m also offered ten times more “value” in free bonuses I have to wonder if the product is really worth the price, or is it really worth anything at all? Or maybe the bonuses are worthless? Hmm?
10. Straight Out False Advertising
    I’m not going to look up the definiton of “false advertising” for you. Anyway, some sales letters make claims that are simply untrue. The infamous “Get Google Ads Free” e-book is an example of what could be referred to as a borderline case… maybe… if you’re feeling unusually lenient.

Here’s an amazing site that makes fun of some sales page cliches – Buy My Stupid Book.
And another one – ClickHereYouIdiot.com (not so funny yet interesting anyway).

By the way, if you’re looking for information on how to write a sales page, check out these copywriting resources.

White Shadow :: Jul.02.2007 :: Rants, Tips & Tricks :: 16 Comments »

I have sometimes wondered which marketplace categories get the most affiliate attention or what gravity value is “just right” – not too low and not too competitive. I’m sure ClickBank vendors spend a while thinking what commission rate would look most attractive to affiliates. These questions can be answered – to an extent – with statistical analysis of ClickBank marketplace data and historical trends.

It just so happens I keep a local copy of CBTool database which contains exactly that information. Yesterday I spent a few hours analyzing it and in this post I’ll show you the results I came up with.

Distribution of Products by Marketplace Category
Products that belong to several categories were counted in all of them. As might be expected, “Money & Employment” is leading with 20% of all products belonging to this category.

How Popular With Affiliates is Each Category?
Gravity represents the number of affiliates that have promoted a product, so the sum of all category’s product’s gravity values shows how many affiliates are promoting products from that category. Looks like 47% of affiliates are promoting the three categories which basically contain “make money” related stuff.

Most Attractive Commissions and Prices
I rounded up all commissions to full dollars and calculated the sum of gravity for every distinct “earned per sale” value. This indicates the number of affiliates that promote products with a specific commission size. I did the same for price (estimated, ClickBank doesn’t provide that info in the marketplace so the price graph is probably slightly innacurate). Looks like most affilates promote products that pay out around $22 and cost around $33.

Vendors and Gravity

Some more numbers
Approximately 21.4 new vendors are added to the marketplace every day and around 15.65 vendors drop out daily meaning ClickBank’s marketplace grows by 5.75 products daily on average.

The categories that get the most products added per day :

• 4.76/day – Money & Employment
• 4.43/day – Business to Business
• 4.42/day – Health & Fitness

That’s it for today

White Shadow :: Jun.29.2007 :: Clickbank Stuff :: 2 Comments »

Read this first : I’m NOT selling anything here. This post simply describes an amazing idea I had today.

Many authors have tried to sell an “automated profit-generating system” of some kind. Actually I’m sure there’s at least one e-book out there with that exact title. Needless to say none of these “systems” are actually completely automated and you’d be lucky to get something more than another rehashed “affiliate marketing for dummies” fluff-piece.

What most don’t realize is that with the recent technological advances and multiple internet marketing related tools appearing recently, we are now closer than ever before to a truly automated moneymaking system. Many typical tasks the affiliate marketer faces have already been automated to some extent – keyword research, conversion tracking, content creation, etc – and if those techniques were combined appropriately we might finally have the proverbial “cash machine” on our hands.

Below I’ve described a general outline of my vision of this ultimate system. It would be a highly complex piece of software consisting of multiple modules (each of which already has existing implementations) –

1. Product Selection Module
   This component would select “interesting” products worth promoting, like highly ranked products at ClickBank or products currently becoming more popular (determined by rankings changing over time).
   Examples : CBTool, CBEngine and many others.
2. Keyword Extraction Module
   This script would visit each product’s website and extract product-related keywords from it.
   Examples : Google and most other search engines.
3. Keyword Research Module
   Once the product keywords were found, they would be passed to a keyword research software that would find more related keywords. This can be done by accessing online keyword tools (like Google’s) or using natural language processing techniques (a subdiscipline of AI research rarely utilised for this task).
   Examples : KeywordElite and many others.

4. Ad Spy Module
   The extended keyword list would be fed to a “PPC spy” script. This script would track the ads appearing on search engine(s) for these keywords and determine
   • Profitable keywords.
   • Profitable ad copy.
   • Profitable products – this one is a bit tricky. You could either take the product already being promoted (could cause URL collisions and other trouble) or select a similar product from the list generated in the first step. Product similarity could be determined by them both having similar keywords (or more advanced techniques).

   Examples : GC Detective, AdSpyPro (note : these don’t implement the product selection)

5. Ad Rewriter Module
   This doesn’t have to be a complex one – just replacing a word or two with synonyms and changing the URL/Title might be enough. You could also throw in some form of split-testing. This module would create modified ads for the keyword/ad/product combination selected by the previous module.
   Examples : Content rewriting software. I can’t give any specific examples as I haven’t used it, but I know it exists.

6. PPC Interface Module
   This component would set up the ads on the PPC engine of choice, e.g. AdWords. It would also extract various data like cost per click, average ad position and so on.
   Examples : Various AdWords wizards and management software.

7. Keyword/Conversion Tracking Module
   This one would track all clicks on the keyword level and find out which keyword/ad combinations convert to sales and which don’t. It would discard the non-performing ads and leave/improve the good ones (small automatic tess and improvements are possible with the help of Ad Rewrite Module discussed above).

   Affiliates usually can’t use Google’s conversion tracking effectively because they have no control over the vendor’s “thank you” page that is displayed on a successful purchase. So an alternative tracking mechanism is necessary – and many do exist.

   Examples : X-Ray Domination, CBTool Keyword Tracking (free), Xtreme Conversions and many more. While the existing tools don’t automatically determine which keywords are profitable (just conversion rate & income/click) that feature could easily be added because this hypothetical system already includes a PPC Interface module making it possible to get the costs/click. This means it could calculate profits/click (or losses/click) on its own.

… and there you have it! A system like that would automatically find products to promote, create ads, track and improve the results. All you’d need to do would be to configure it (like set maximum ad expediture per day and such) and let it make money for you.

While it might seem unbelievable, everything described above is already possible. Of course it would require a truly tremendous amount of programming work and would need powerful server(s) to run on – but it can be done.

With that said, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a software like that anytime soon. Even if someone could afford to spend a fortune on having it developed – and I assure you the costs would be high- it would most probably be kept secret. This system relies on the existance of “normal” marketers whose ads are used for research so it simply cannot be allowed to spread.

Another problem is that creating such a system would require lots of knowledge, marketing skill and money (as already mentioned above), meaning the author must be pretty close to a “marketing guru”. And a guru doesn’t really need an “automated cash machine” – he’s doing well already. Why would (s)he spend a huge amount of resources on what is essentially a newbies dream? Creating it and selling it to newbies would not be possible due to the problems discussed in the previous paragraph.

While possible, and automated moneymaking system is very unlikely.
Feel free to comment on this craziness

White Shadow :: Jun.26.2007 :: Rants :: 2 Comments »

I stumbled upon Willie Crawford’s blog and noticed a post about PPCDefender – a piece of software that is supposed to stop programs that try to spy on competitors PPC campaigns. Some notable examples of the “competition spy” variety are GCDetective and AdSpyPro.

I’m not impressed by PPCDefender. Software like AdSpyPro lets you find profitable keywords, ad copy and products. PPCDefender only makes a feeble attempt to protect one of these – the product, or more precisely the landing page. Someone using PPC spy software could still as easily discover your profitable keywords and ads.

PPCDefender is a simple PHP script that achieves some level of “protection” by only allowing visitors who came from Google to see the page. This is done by checking what URL they came from – the “referer” URL feature that most web browsers support. Repeat visitors will also be admitted because PPCDefender creates a cookie to identify them. An experienced programmer could easily spoof the referer URL (or the cookie) and make PPCDefender think the spy script is legitimate visitor. There are also other ways to defeat the “defender” but I won’t describe them here as it would get very technical soon.

And yes, the PPCDefender script is of course “encrypted” and anyone trying to overcome it would have to spend days reverse-engineering it, wouldn’t he? No, not really. The encryption (actually obfuscation) is trivial and it wouldn’t take more than half an hour for someone with enough PHP experience to crack it.

PPCDefender in it’s current form is only a temporary annoyance that the PPC spy programmers could solve in less than a day. The defenders author promises to keep up to date with competition spy software evolution and update PPCDefender as needed… we’ll see how that goes. I suspect he won’t have much success.

If you’re really paranoid…

If you really want to protect your AdWords ads from scripts like GCDetective you could change the Display URL and/or the Target URL for each ad frequently (at least once a day). I haven’t tried to reverse-engineer PPC spy software but I think it probably uses the URL(s) to identify each ad. PPC spies aim to find ads that run for a long time and if the URL changed often it would look like they are different ads every day. For an even more reliable protection you could slightly change the ad text, display URL, target URL and the product link on the landing page and identifiable portions of the page (like title, etc). This process can be automated with some effot but is it worth it?

I think for the anti-intelligence tools this will be a losing fight overall.

White Shadow :: Jun.26.2007 :: Reviews :: 6 Comments »

ClickBank has finally implemented recurring billing! It can be used to receive recurring payments for products and services like membership sites and subscriptions, offering lots of new possibilities for vendors.

Read more about it here :

Recurring Billing Description
Recurring Billing FAQ

I’ve already updated CBTool to display the relevant information – the “Future $” and “Total $/sale” values are available on the vendor info page (the Recurring Billing FAQ explains what they mean).

There are currently no products in Marketplace with recurring billing enabled… we’ll probably have to wait a while for those. I know I’d like to see some – getting paid every month for every customer you referred sounds better than a one-off commission

White Shadow :: Jun.21.2007 :: CBTool News, Clickbank Stuff :: 3 Comments »

Don’t buy it. If you already did – tough. All it has are two simple link cloaking methods based on HTML, similar to what one of my free cloaking scripts does + some cookie stuffing. I wasn’t impressed – well, actually I was impressed they managed to sell this stuff.

On a completely unrelated note, ClickBank seems to have skipped an update today, so CBTool hasn’t been updated either.

White Shadow :: Jun.17.2007 :: CBTool News, Reviews :: 2 Comments »