CBTool Blog

This evening I went walking at the dusk and inexplicably my thoughts turned to the unpleasant topic of the many worthless “make money” products out there (and many more coming every day). They just don’t seem to ever get anywhere. There’s one popular e-book, then another comes out, and another one, and at least a half of them promiss to give you the exact steps to getting rich and famous, or at least rich. There seems to be some misconception that drives newbies to purchase another “adwords+clickbank+magic=profit” course and lets some authors churn out one book after another. There might be more than one, but this time I’m going to go for the”plan” stuff, also known as the “blueprint”.

Let me show you what I’m talking about. Here’s an ultra-simple three-step success blueprint to becoming rich quick :

1. Create a product based on a unique idea in a hungry niche.
2. Create a professional website and ell the product on the Internet (use ClickBank or whatever).
3. Drive massive amount of targeted traffic to your site.

…and that’s how you can become a millionaire!

… what, are you still reading?! Why aren’t you excitedly rushing to implement the steps I laid out before you so clearly? Ohh, you don’t know how to accomplish them? Tough.

The truth is that while the process described above can actually work, it takes a huge amount of work and experience to be able to accomplish those steps. Also, it’s not very specific. However, a newbie purchasing a “blueprint” expects an explicit, specific instruction set, because that’s what “blueprint” means - “a detailed plan or design” (I just pulled this definition from Google). Many e-books just assume some things “happen” and don’t go into detail.

Another thing a real blueprint has and most “make money” plans don’t is completeness. If you’re the guy who builds houses you don’t have to worry about things like where to put the doors. The blueprint already has that. In fact, there are machines - robots, if you will - that manufacture hardware stuff (like cars) using a “blueprint” or a program (which is just that - a detailed plan). Newbies expect to receive something like that. They want an automated money printing press (I bet there’s a product named like that!). Well, there’s no such thing. There can be no such thing. Anyone implying they’ll teach you how to get/buy/build such a device is deceiving you.

If it would be possible to precisely and unambiguously define the exact steps to making money online, someone would write a software to do it. There’s no such (working) software in sight.

To use any of the “blueprints” available, you must have this one thing, this one ingredient no product will give you, whatever the price - creativity. And that, my dear reader, is not what real-life blueprints require of their implementator - being creative is the task of the architect designing the blueprint.

Many E-Book authors would have their customers believe they (the author) are the architect, providing the complete blueprint. All the inexperienced customer needs to do is implement “these exact steps“… “Even if you’re an total dumbass/average Joe/lazy git, you can make money with my ubercool product!”. Ah-ha. Right. That’s not how it works.

In internet marketing (and in most other parts of your conscious life, too) you must be the architect. You must invent, create and improvise. E-Books, reports, newsletters - they can give you tools, inspiration, ideas and knowledge, but they can’t give you “the exact steps to achieving financial freedom”. You’ll have to work and be creative to achieve that.

Sure, you can survive without creativity… but would you really want that?

Well, it’s 0:47 now and I’m going to watch an old episode of Battlestar Galactica before I go to sleep. Congratulations, you made it to the end of this rant!

White Shadow :: Jun.13.2007 :: Rants :: 1 Comment »

“15k In 7 Days” is an audio interview + a PDF transcript that talk about building a responsive list and just how exactly did Brian Edmondson (a little-known marketer at the time) make more than $15 000 from his small opt-in list just in one product launch he was an affiliate for.

I’m pretty sure all the “super affiliates” are going to roll out cool presells and bonuses for this one, giving you a bunch of enticing reaons to buy it from them. Go for it. It’s good. I’ll just give you some facts :

• This report tells you how to get an “optimized list” - a list of responsive subscribers and buyers, not freebie seekers.
• You’ll find out how Brian’s list generates him more than five times the income/subscriber than is the industry average.
• Why you must build a personal relationship with your list.
• How the often shunned list-building strategies like safelist advertising and giveaways can provide you with high quality subscribers instead of freebie hoarders. Just a few tricks you need to know…
• Other good ways to build your list.
• How to condition your subscribers to buy from you and not some other affiliate.
• … plus a lot more about opt-in lists and marketing.

On the topic of fluff - it’s not a “step-by-step blueprint” or something of that kind, whatever you might see someone write. There’s good info inside and you’ll need to listen/read through the interview and make notes. No “get rich in 5 minutes” plan here.

Check out 15kin7days.com for more info, it’s going live today.

White Shadow :: Jun.12.2007 :: Reviews :: No Comments »

Initially I designed the Search page so that it would look good on my screen (yeah, I’m a bit selfish ;)). The table displaying the results is optimized for large display resolutions (over 1024×768) and looks really messed up in a smaller window.

I tried to redesign it so that it would display equally well on any resolution, but without much success. So I went and created a “narrow” layout option to the search page. It doesn’t look as good, but should be readable even on a 800×600 display.

That’s it Just a short update today.

White Shadow :: Jun.08.2007 :: CBTool News :: No Comments »

Before I begin, let’s do a quick recap of what “gravity” is :

Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.
(Description taken from Clickbank.com. Emphasis mine.)

So, if you’re a ClickBank vendor, why would you want to increase the gravity number? The answer is that many affiliates will check your product’s gravity and historical performance before deciding whether to promote it. Product’s with a decent gravity score, and - more importantly - a rising gravity trend - are more likely to attract affiliates. More affiliates => more sales => more profits for you!

So how do you go about increasing the gravity? Only affiliate sales influence the gravity number (see above), so you need to make sure that most of your sales come from affiliates. There are two main methods to achieve this :

1. Whenever you promote your product using PPC, forums, and so on, use your own affiliate link - you can get another CB account for free and use that to promote your hoplink. Note : If you have an opt-in form on your sales page - for a newsletter or something similar - don’t use your affiliate link in the e-mails, or you might end up robbing your affiliates of their rightful commissions.
2. Redirect those visitors that arrived without an affiliate id to your own affiliate link. It’s more complex than it sounds - you should do this redirect only once per visitor. Why? If a visitor originally comes through an affiliate link (no redirection) and doesn’t purchase the product immediately, instead bookmarking your page, he would be redirected next time he visited (through a bookmarked link with no affiliate id), effectively overwriting the previous affiliate id.

I’ve written a script that implements the second method. To use it, you’ll need some basic HTML knowledge and a web host that supports PHP. Here’s what you need to do :

1. Make a copy of your sales page. For example, if your sales page is called index.html, name the copy index2.html
2. Make sure the original file has a “.php” extension. If not, rename it so it does. For example, index.html => index.php
3. Replace the HTML code of the original sales page with the code below.
4. Edit the real_sales_page and your_own_affiliate_link variables to match your setup.

Redirection code :

<?php

	$real_sales_page='index2.html'; //your sales page copy
	$your_own_affiliate_link='http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/'; //your affiliate link
	$test_cookies=true; //true or false

	//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
	//           You do not need to edit anything below this line.
	//-------------------------------------------------------------------------

	if( ( isset($_GET['hop']) &&
		($_GET['hop']!='0')) ||
		( isset($_COOKIE['rdf_found']) &&
		($_COOKIE['rdf_found']=='yes')) ) {

		setcookie('rdf_found','yes', time()+60*60*24*90,'/');
		header('Location: '.$real_sales_page);

	} else {

		if($test_cookies){

			$script=$_SERVER["PHP_SELF"];
			if( !isset($_GET['ctest']) ) {
				setcookie('ctest','test', time()+60*60*24*2,'/');
				header('Location: '.$script.'?ctest=test');
				exit;
			} else {
				$cookies_enabled=$_GET['ctest']==$_COOKIE['ctest'];
			};

			if($cookies_enabled){
				header('Location: '.$your_own_affiliate_link);
			} else {
				echo 'cookies disabled.';
				header('Location: '.$real_sales_page);
			};

		} else {
			header('Location: '.$your_own_affiliate_link);
		};

	};
	exit();
?>

The above code also checks if the visitor has cookies enabled and will not redirect to your affiliate link if not. This is done to ensure it doesn’t mess with the supplemental hoplink tracking CB has recently implemented (if you want to know what that is, check ClickBank news).

I hope this information is useful to you

White Shadow :: Jun.06.2007 :: Tips & Tricks :: 1 Comment »

If you want to sell more than one product - like e-books on different topics - you’ll need a way to make the hoplink redirect the visitor to the appropriate page or site. You shouldn’t dump all your products on a single page, because it’s distracting to the visitor, generates less sales and no decent affiliate is going to promote an unfocused site like that.

Unfortunately ClickBank allows you to sell multiple different items, but only gives you one hoplink URL per vendor account. To comfortably sell different products under one vendor id, you’ll need to use a trick or two. Read on.

ClickBank allows you to append additional data to the hoplink, e.g. “http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/?product=product2″. It is possible to write a script (a computer program) that will use this information to seamlessly redirect the visitor to a different site for each item.

Luckily, you don’t have to do that yourself - there are already several solutions available :

EasyClickMate
Okay, EasyClickmate has a lot more features than just selling multiple products using one ClickBank account. It protects your download page, calculates click and conversion stats, can notify you by e-mail when an affiliate makes a sale, increases your ratings in search engines, provides a back-end for your affiliates to check their own stats and more. It’s also easy to install, and the author can install it for you (for an additional fee). More info at EasyClickMate.com

CB Multi-Item Manager
If you think you don’t need all the additional features of EasyClickMate or think it’s too expensive, take a look at this multi-item manager - www.richwerx.net/cbmim.html. For less than half the price, it will also allow you to sell more than one product under one account, and includes a download protector as a bonus.

Personally I’d recommend using EasyClickMate, as many of it’s features are really essential to being a ClickBank merchant and you’ll wonder how you managed without it.

White Shadow :: Jun.04.2007 :: Tips & Tricks :: No Comments »

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 :: No Comments »

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 »