CBTool Blog

What is it?
NeoPerformancer is a system designed to optimize your PPC performance. Basically it’s a keyword-tracking script, with lots of features :

• Helps you discover new and profitable keywords.
• Detects click fraud and presents detailed statistics.
• Allows you to optimize your landing pages by dynamically inserting keywords on the page.
• You can both link directly to vendors’ sales page or your own landing pages.
• Automatically calculates costs, profits, CTRs and ROIs on campaign, group and individual keyword levels.
• + more.

My Impressions
I’m quite interested in affiliate marketing-related software, and keyword tracking in particular (I even have my own free click tracking script), so naturally I went out and got NeoPerformancer the day it came out. After testing it for a while, I thought I’d write a review to help people decide whether this tool is the right for them. Here’s some of my experience with NeoPerformancer :

So, installing it is pretty straightforward – it’s a bunch of PHP files, that you put on your webhost, then create a database for it to use (you might need to consult your host’s documentation if you’ve never done this before) and run the installation script. NeoPerformancer comes with step-by-step instructions on what to do.

After it’s set up, you can log in to a management interface that looks a lot like Google AdWords – same colors, same layout, etc. It was purposefully designed to be similar to AdWords and thus greatly reduce the time needed to learn to use it. In my opinion, it only partially accomplishes that task – while it looks the same, there are many tiny differences, that made me go “Hmm? I didn’t expect that! What does this do?”. However, while it’s not a “zero learning curve” as claimed on the authors page, you can get up to speed pretty fast, especially since there are instructional videos available.

NeoPerformancer campaigns are again similar to AdWords – each can contain a number of groups. A group is either a “direct linking” group, or a “landing page” group and has an associated URL and a list of keywords. You have to add the keywords manually – while NP will get you some new keywords, you need to do the initial research yourself. Each keyword is assigned a unique link, and it is possible to copy & paste the whole list to an AdWords adgroup. You can also assign the cost-per-click in NeoPerfomancer. NP provides a number of statistics for every keyword.

In tracking keyword profitability, NP didn’t live up to my expectations. You have to enter the income for each keyword, manually, to calculate ROI and related statistics. While I didn’t expect the author to provide automatic sales data analysis for all the different merchants/services out there, it would be nice if popular ones like ClickBank or PayDotCom would have been included. It’s not that hard, I’ve done it before. Honestly, the whole keyword-level income tracking is confusing in NP and the documentation is lacking (at the moment at least).

In Conclusion
Well… It’s good, but not great. In my opinion, there’s still work to be done to make this a top-notch product. Worth considering however.

Visit NeoPerformancer Site For More Information

White Shadow :: May.30.2007 :: Reviews :: No Comments »

Today I’m going to explain how to create HTML files that will not only hide your affiliate link, but also prevent the “?hop=yourid” from appearing in the address bar and how to stealthily redirect your domain or webpage to a vendor’s salespage – without changing the URL visible to the visitor.

The simplest way to achieve that is to create a .html file containing this code :

If you want to redirect your domain to your affiliate link, name this file “index.html” and place it in the root directory of your domain.

Okay, the above code works – if you open the file in a web browser, you’ll see the contents of the site you put in place of “your_affiliate_link” and the address bar will show the URL of the file, not your affiliate link. The “?hop=” doesn’t appear, too. All good so far, but what if a web-savvy visitor decides to view the source of your cloaked page? He’d be able to easily find your affiliate link. Let’s fix this.

To make the cloaked link even more secure, it can be converted to “encrypted” JavaScript. Then the source code would look something like this :

Creating this cloaking code manually is next to impossible, so I suggest you use the free cloaked link generator I just added to CBTool.

So, you just learned another way to cloak your links, stealthily redirect domains and protect your affiliate commissions. I hope this information will be useful to you.

That’s all for today

White Shadow :: May.23.2007 :: Tips & Tricks :: 1 Comment »

What I call a “nice” link is actually a form of a cloaked link that serves a twofold purpose – to hide your affiliate id and to make the link look less like a blatant advertisement.

You’ve probably seen links like these – mydomain.com/recommends/Product. Certainly looks better than an obvious affiliate link, doesn’t it? Numerous marketers claim that such cloaked links increase clickthroughs and are perceived as less ’salesy’ than standard links. Cloaked links also help reduce commission theft, as your actual URL isn’t in plain view.

Today I’m going to tell you about several ways to create “nice” cloaked links. To use them you’ll need a web host (preferably with your own domain name) that supports PHP and (for the more advanced kinds of links) mod_rewrite. Most hosting providers have these installed.

Creating a Simple Cloaked Link

The simplest kind of a cloaked link is a PHP file that redirects the visitor to your affiliate link. Start up your favorite text editor (Notepad will do) and copy & paste this code into it :
<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net/");
exit();
?>
Replace the link with your own and save the file as <someproduct>.php (use a descriptive name with no spaces and special symbols; example – CovertLinks.php).

Now create a new directory on your web server where you will store the cloaked links. Name this directory “recommends” (or use any name that looks good to you) . Put the file there, and your’re done! Now you can send people to your affiliate link by giving them the URL www.yourdomain.com/yourdirectory/yourfile.php

Creating Better Cloaked Links

The previous method requires that you create a new file for each link, which seems like unnecessary work. The link would probably look better without the “.php” extension, too. So, here’s another – slightly better – method.

You’ll need to create two files and put them in the “recommends” (or whatever name you used) directory. The first file should be named .htaccess and contain this :
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?site=$1 [L]
Next, create a file named index.php and put it in the same directory :
<?php
$links=array(
  'SomeSite' => 'http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/',
  'AnotherSite' => 'http://affiliate.avendor.hop.clickbank.net/',
  'YetAnotherSite' => 'http://affiliate.productx.hop.clickbank.net/'
);
if(isset($_GET['site']) && isset($links[$_GET['site']])){
  //site found - redirect
  header('Location: '.$links[$_GET['site']]);
} else {
  //site not found - send to an error page (or use a different URL)
  header('Location: error.html');
};
exit();
?>
There is a list of links in the code above, in the form name => ‘link’. What you need to do is place your links in this list. “Name” is what you’d want to write after “recommends”, and ‘link’ is, obviously, your affiliate link. Also note that after each entry there is a comma, except the last one.

After you’ve added your links and uploaded both files to your host, you will be able to use “nice” links in your e-mails and other promotions, like this –
me.com/recommends/xyz

You can later add new links just by editing the index.php file as explained above. You can also mix this method with the previous one.

Using CBTool “Nice Links”
CBTool has a “Nice links” feature that plugs into the keyword tracking script, meaning you will also know how many times your link was clicked. Unlike the previous methods, there is no need to edit any files – just download the script and place it on your server. New links are created as tracking campaigns in CBTool. Read the full description on CBTool site (you need to be logged in to access that page). At the moment this only works for ClickBank hoplinks. Oh yeah, I almost forgot – the CBTool service is free.

Using Commercial Redirectors and Link Cloakers

There’s a bunch of paid-for scripts and utilities on the market. Often all they have is a nice user interface built on top of the first two methods described above, possibly with database integration. One that caught my eye is the Covert Affiliate Links product, you might want to check it out.

In Conclusion
So, that’s one way of cloaking your affiliate links – using PHP scripts to redirect the user. These are often used to hide affiliate links in e-mails or redirect domains (just use the “simple” method, name the file “index.php” and put it in the root directory of your domain). Next week I’m going to discuss other cloaking methods – frames, encrypted JavaScript, and more – which are useful in different situations.
See you later

White Shadow :: May.18.2007 :: Tips & Tricks :: No Comments »

Here’s a summary of recent changes on the CBTool site -

• Watchlists can now be searched just like categories. Simply choose “My Watchlist” from the category list.
• You can quickly sort the result list by clicking on some of the column headers.
• Adding/removing sites to your watchlist is now faster, as it doesn’t cause the whole page to reload any more.
• There’s a “nice links” feature that is intended to allow you to produce good-looking links like domain.com/recommends/product. I’ll write more about this topic later.
• Searching by title/description has been improved a tiny bit, but still needs work.
• I’ve moved the database stats to another page, leaving only the date of last update on the main page.
• …other minor changes.

White Shadow :: May.18.2007 :: CBTool News :: No Comments »

Here are some of my reasons for starting this blog –

• Once in a while, I add a new feature to CBTool, fix a bug or perform some other update. I can tell you about these updates here and avoid clogging the front page.
• I read some affiliate-marketing related forums, and I see the same questions asked repeatedly by different people. Well, I’m just too lazy to answer them most of the time Instead, I’m going to post some related articles here, mainly focusing on technical topics, like link cloaking, click tracking and so on.
• Product reviews. Yeah, everyone does them.
• …anything else I find interesting that’s related to internet marketing and affiliate programs.

White Shadow :: May.15.2007 :: CBTool News, Rants :: No Comments »