Affiliate Starter

Making Money from Proxy Sites

admin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:02:53 +0000

A proxy site is basically a website that allows users to visit other websites anonymously. It is popular with students looking to visit Myspace/Facebook/Bebo etc from school but are blocked from doing so.

The perfect way to monotize on this is to get a cheap proxy hosting package, get a free theme from one of the sites below, and optimize it to include your Google Adsense publisher ID.

Themes -

www.aproxytheme.com - large selection of free themes to use
www.phproxyskins.com - some quality themes available
www.freeproxytemplates.com - small collection without thumbnails

I’ve got my proxy set up, how do i get visitors?!

The easy part is now completed. To get visitors you will need to be very creative. With proxys, if you have an easy to remember domain name, then traffic can rapidly increase by word of mouth. Think of creative ways to get free traffic, including Facebook groups, Myspace groups, use it on your signatures in forums and so on.

Top Tips

Be creative - find the best ways to generate traffic
Proxys with the actual word “proxy” in the domain are nearly always blocked by default on school servers, so you would be missing out on a lot of traffic. Think of something original.
Submit your site to proxy.org to get some extra traffic

Use Wikipedia to find Social Network sites to submit your site to! They have a large list with number of users as well.

AffStarter Tool - Cloak Your Links

admin — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:31:12 +0000

Cloaking your affiliate links can vastly increase it’s CTR’s, as people are more confident clicking on a link taking the user to a current page instead of a messy external link.

If you use PPC to send traffic to a website with your affiliate link, for example a games store, then the link:

yourgameswebsite.com/gta4

looks a lot better than:

http://nbjmp.com/click/?s=11111&c=9999

Use the tool below to generate the code to put in your .htaccess file on your server to forward to your affiliate link, or hide your affiliate link from being shown in the status bar.

Adding Google Analytics to Wordpress

admin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:59:28 +0000

Google Analytics is a popular and very useful tool for webmasters to track statistics on their website.

It is a free product and has recently had a major design overhaul, better displaying statistics and data that will help you improve your website.

How to insert Google Analytics code into Wordpress:

Once you have signed up for an account from Google, add your website by following the screen instructions and when you are shown the code, go to the “New Tracking Code (ga.js)” option, and copy the code.

On your Wordpress dashboard, go to:

Design > Theme Editor

Now choose the template you wish to edit, and from the sidebar go to the Header (header.php) link.

Find where the tag begins, and paste the code AFTER that.

Now go back to Google Analytics and wait for it to give you confirmation.

Optimise and improve

Tip: To make sure that when you view your website the stats aren’t counted by Google, go to your Analytics account, and proceed to Filter Manager.

Choose “Exclude all traffic from an IP address” and input your IP address.

Press save changes.

Backlink Building - Part 3 - Forum and Blog Comments

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:31:31 +0000

Getting your link on popular blogs

Want to get your link on the front page of popular blogs in your niche for free? It isn’t hard.

Search your site keywords in Google to find popular blogs in your niche. Check in their sidebar if they have a “Top Commentators” box with a list of the people who have left the most comments.

If they do, that’s good! All you need to do is regularely post comments on their posts. Make sure your posts are not just a few words long, and actually have some quality in them, otherwise they will be marked as spam and you could be banned from leaving future comments.

Why this is good?

Simply put, you are getting a “dofollow” link on your competitors page, which will increase the SEO for your site. A juicy backlink for free.

Getting your link on popular forums

Again, search for your sites keywords in Google, and add “forum” to the end of the search query. Sign up to some of the forums you see, and participate in conversations with members. Once again, no spamming! It will only affect you.

Customize your signature to include your websites link, which will then be appended to all your posts. Again a good “dofollow” link to your site.

Backlink Building - Part 2- Social Media

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:19:52 +0000

Using social media effictively can get you quality free backlinks along with many visitors.

The following websites are very useful for submitting your articles to. In return for providing good quality content, you will get new visitors and a backlink. If the website has enabled “nofollow” on their links, then you will not get a backlink, but bear in mind that many people scrape these sites and copy them with “dofollow” links, so it always is a good idea to use these methods.

When presenting yourself on other websites, ensure you use good punctuation, spelling/grammar and submit it to the appropriate category. Failure to do so may annoy the users who will disregard your site!

1. Digg

Good old Digg! Warning, make sure your server can withold the effect of being on the front page of Digg! You will get a very large exponential increase in traffic if your content gets to the front. Sign up for them and submit your articles.

2. Sphinn

If your site belongs in the search and marketing sector, then just like Digg, submit your articles to Sphinn. You won’t get as much traffic, but you will get quality traffic from customers looking for quality content like yours.

3. StumbleUpon

Submit your articles and hope that users will find it worthwile enough to Stumble it. A good amount of traffic.

Backlink Building - Part 1 - Introduction

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:50:53 +0000

What is a backlink and why does it concern me?

Straight from wikipedia, backlinks are:

….incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page.

You may be thinking that this doesn’t concern you, however, creating a vast amount of backlinks can vastly improve your PageRank and position in search engine results pages, driving more visitors to your website.

This is a multi-series guide to building backlinks in many ways, from free methods to the paid ways.

Current Backlinks

It would be good to see how many backlinks you have now without any optimisation (unless you’ve already done some!). A few websites tell you how many links back to your site they have found. iwebtool have a handy tool to let you know how many backlinks a site has. Go here to check how many you have.

Different Ways of Increasing Backlink Count

We will go through the following ways of getting more backlinks:

Social Media
Classified Ads
Forum and Blog Comments

Redirect example.com to www.example.com

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:56:37 +0000

With regards to Search Engine Optimization, you want to get full tracking on your websites and give search engines a clear insight into your website.

If your website is www.example.com, then ensure you only allow visitors to access the site through example.com or www.example.com. Only one of these should be allowed, to ensure your site is viewed as one.

The quickest way of doing this is making a .htaccess file in the root of your site. To redirect all example.com visits to www.example.com, insert the following code in your file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

That’s it! Make sure you change yoursite to your domain and .com to your top level domain. Make sure the file is called “.htaccess” with nothing in front of the full stop.

Getting Keywords for PPC

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:19:40 +0000

If you are going to advertise your site through Pay Per Click, then you will need a list of keywords that match your site.

Long-tail vs. Short-tail: What’s the Difference?

You may have heard the above phrases and not understood what they represent. A short-tail keyword is usually just one or two words, e.g. “Nike shoes” or “hosting”, as oppose to a long-tail keyword e.g. “black leather Nike Air Max shoes” or “reliable managed dedicated hosting free domain”.

Clearly there is a big difference. Although the short-tail will get you a large amount of impressions, the conversion rate will be low, as someone may be looking for white Nike shoes whereas you only sell black ones, causing the customer to leave.

In contrast, long-tail keywords usually target exactly what a customer is looking for. The impressions may be low, but the CTR and the conversion rate will be high because it is what the customer is looking for.

If you are just looking to get traffic quick, then short-tail will quickly achieve your goal, whereas if you want repeat customers and good conversions, go with long-tail keywords.

How do I Find Good Keywords?

Put yourself in your customers shoes and think what they would search for looking for a specific item or service. Generate as many keywords as you can think off. It is good to use a good variation of long and short keywords.

There are many free and paid tools available to generate keywords, below are some that I have used along with a short description about each one.

1. Google AdWords: Keyword Tool (free)

Generate keywords free of charge straight from Google. What I like about this is the option to input a website and automatically get a list of keywords matching that site. You can also tailor keywords to a specific location.

Price: $ FREE!

Go to the Keyword Tool now

2. Wordze (paid subscription)

Wordze is a very powerful tool for gathering a very large list of keywords. However, they also have many extra services available to improve your advertising. This includes the latest trends and what is being searched, downloads of the latest top search lists, competitor keyword data and more.

Price: Day Trial $7.96, Monthly Subscription $45

Google Adsense for your Blog

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:17:23 +0000

When it comes to monetizing a site, Google Adsense is king. Nobody can beat the vast amount of advertisers Google holds. Nobody can beat the quality of Google’s context based ad system, or the ease of inserting ad blocks onto a site.

Many people try to slap 10 Adsense blocks and Amazon ads all over their blog, before even having a solid user base. Any reader would be quick to leave a site full of advertising, without getting anything in return. We recommend that you do not attempt to monetize a blog until you have about 100 RSS readers, or a good amount of traffic.

If you are using the free Blogger (owned by Google) platform, then it only takes a few clicks to add a block of Google Adsense onto your blog.

When you insert a block onto your page (it will look similar to below), you earn money every time a reader clicks on the ads. Do not click your own ads, you will be banned from Adsense for life, Google is not stupid.

The type of block you add to your site depends on the layout of it. Try to change the colours around so the block fits nicely into your site without looking obtrusive.

Getting the most out of Adsense:

You could leave your blocks to earn you money to cover your hosting costs, but if you really want to make money from Adsense, then you will need to do more work.

1) Increase traffic – more traffic results in more people reading your blog which results in more clicks on your Google ads = more money earned.

2) Increase quality – Your click through rate (users clicked/users viewed) will increase if you have higher quality content that yields more expensive ads to be shown which means you earn more money per click.

3) Optimised ads – Don’t but black ads on a light blue page. Make your blocks blend into your page, so it looks like part of your site. This will result in more clicks.

Installing Adsense on your blog:

First of all you should get an Adsense account. You need a working site/blog (no “Under Construction”) to be accepted onto the program. Depending on your blogging platform, there are a few differences to getting Adsense on your page.

Blogger:
Go to the Template tab in your admin panel.
Go to > Add a Page Element > Choose a New Page Element
Sign in with your account
Configure and optimise ad!
Click for a more in-depth tutorial

Wordpress:
With wordpress there are several popular plugins to input Adsense blogs onto your site. We have chosen the “Adsense Manager” script, available here to download.

Download the file from the above link and extract it.
Copy the /adsense-manager to /wp-content/plugins/
Activate plugin by going to “Plugins” on your Wordpress dashboard and pressing Activate.
Configure and optimise ad!

Drupal
Again, many choices when choosing a module, but we thought that the “Advertisement” script was most effective and had the best tracking. Go here to download.

Download file from above link and extract it.
Copy /ad directory to your /modules/ directory.
Login to dashboard and enable modules.
Configure ads at Administer > Modules > Settings > Embedded Ads
Configure and optimise ad!

Using the Google Content Network

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:31:15 +0000

A lot of people deactivate the Google Content Network when they launch a campaigh, believing it to drive customers that don’t convert. Many times, optimising your campaigns for the content network can make them very successful with a low average CPC. Anik Singal reveals how he uses the “content network” when using Google Adwords.

Note: this is not my work, I am simply helping spread the word.

Your Uncloaked Affiliate Link		e.g. http://nbjmp.com/click/?s=11111&c=9999
Title Text for Link		What to display in the status bar.
Cloaked destination on your server		Where you want the link to go to.
New window?		Open the site in new window