Once upon a time it was fairly simple to promote affiliate links in all manner of places without a problem and the more work you put in the more money you could make. Gradually however, those who I like to refer to as the “affiliate nazis” have gradually managed to force their (in my opinion) totally misguided “anti” stance into virtually all corners of the web. They have gone about this with the zeal of others of a similar ilk – the anti smoking extremists come to mind but there are plenty of “anti” driven zealots out there attacking others for all manner of things that they don’t happen to agree with and many who just seem to select a cause and jump on the bandwagon.

Nowadays, typing an affiliate link anywhere other than on your own web properties brings with it an almost inevitable pause for thought because somewhere out there the affiliate haters are just waiting to pounce. What I find quite amazing is how the general antagonism towards affiliates and affiliate marketing has been adopted by so many prominent websites and online services. It is almost as if they endorse and promote the image of an affiliate as some kind of dubious and underhanded criminal, the lowest of the low, without really thinking about why but simply to please and appease the relatively small minority who wage their campaigns of righteous indignation and disapproval against people who are engaged in a perfectly legitimate and commonplace online activity in an attempt to earn a living or some much needed extra money.

I  recently (although not for the first time) became a target for the kind of unprovoked online abuse reserved for affiliates in a forum. I don’t make a habit of joining too many forums and only visit a couple on a regular basis. In one of these where I have been a contributing member for about a year or so, a thread I had started was rudely hijacked by some clown who took exception to my signature file which included an affiliate link to a company I use myself and one which I cannot praise highly enough. This particular forum had no rules against affiliate links in signature files (I have since been exonerated completely by the forum owners of any wrongdoing in their eyes). However, this did not prevent the self appointed forum Nazi policeman from posting offensive remarks about me, my general character, morals and ethics all expressed in language befitting a docker or fish wife. Forget the fact that he knows absolutely nothing about me, my life or anything else. In his twisted and hate filled little mind and from the safety of the “keyboard warrior” mentality he took it upon himself to act as judge, jury and executioner – a crusader against the cancer of affiliates! What a hero.  This individual was not, I should add,  a moderator or someone who held any kind of official position on the site in question but another regular member who could not apparently understand the heavy irony in his personal attack, bad manners and gutter language as he lectured me about the concept of being a “guest” on the forum and behaving accordingly – this was all on a thread that I had started and a discussion on a completely unrelated issue. His own lack of manners and civility didn’t apparently strike him as the least bit hypocritical but then all extremists are the same when you get right down to it and they crawl out from under countless stones on the internet to spew their venom.

As a result of this, the forum owners have decided to clarify their rules and have amended them to ask people not to use affiliate links anywhere on the forum. I do not have a problem with this and was happy to comply but it is unfortunate that such things have to happen this way. I’m sure the coward behind the username would not behave like this if they were sitting in the same room as me or anyone else they feel they have a right to abuse in such a manner for fear of a well deserved punch in the mouth!

Elsewhere the attack on affiliates continues apace. We are constantly told that Google does not like affiliate sites any longer and haven’t for some time. Too many ads on your site will result in penalization blah blah blah. True? I’ve no idea but I know it comes as a result of all the “thin” affiliate sites that were created in droves at one time, sites that offered no content or useful information. Forums, article directories, social media sites, all have caved to those who cry “spammer” (one of the most overused and misused words ever) at the slightest hint of anyone trying to promote anything at all. twitter is a case in point. I have used the micro blogging service from its very early days and my primary account had been steadily built over the years to around 12,000 followers. What now seems to be the almost inevitable suspension came as quite a blow and once an account is suspended by the Twitter bots it seems that the chances of reinstatement have become slimmer and slimmer. On this occasion (as is apparently commonplace) I did not receive any email notifying me of the suspension or the reason behind it. With Twitter you are left to guess. I filed the appeal through the proper channels and after a lengthy wait was told that “prohibited third party services” which had been given access to my account were the reason. I looked at all the programs to which I had allowed access but there were only a handful and none were doing anything onerous as far as I could see but to be on the safe side I revoked all permissions and advised Twitter of the actions I had taken. Twitter then informed me that my account was reinstated – but it wasn’t. I waited 48 hours but the suspension was still not lifted and when I reopened the ticket, in a complete 180 reversal I was told the account would not be reactivated, ever. No reason was given, either for the turnaround or the closure of the account.

I am far from alone in this and it’s frustrating, but as with any free third party service there is little you can do other than say “it’s your world boss” and move on. The new account I opened lasted around three months, during which time I was extremely cautious in light of my suspension experience. Out of the blue this account is suspended too, again with no explanation. The appeal takes several weeks and this time I am genuinely surprised by the reason I am finally given. Apparently, if the majority of your tweets include URL’s it is only a matter of time before you will be flagged and booted. I think this a rather overzealous “rule” but what can you do? I spend most of my time on Twitter answering other user’s questions and requests for help on WordPress related matters for the most part and yes, I post affiliate links to products and services in some of those tweets. Seems this is no longer acceptable on Twitter. Because I do not waste my time and that of others on Twitter posting inane one liners about my day, my personal problems, what colour underwear I’m wearing or which latest vacuous celebrity is sleeping with whom, I’m not using the service in the spirit for which it is apparently intended. It matters not that my inbox is full of thanks from others for my help or answers and appreciation of a recommendation that solved their problems. The fact that most of my tweets are not “personal” and contain links identifies me as a spammer! I’m still undecided about opening another Twitter account and I think that’s a shame.

I wrote this because I am sick and tired of people who constantly crusade against something with no real knowledge of the subject, just a spiteful and hateful attitude based on nothing concrete. The fact is that virtually all affiliate programs, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, do not penalize the customer in any way if they arrive via an affiliate link as opposed to landing there directly. The end user or customer pays the same regardless. So why do some people reserve such venom for the affiliate, who after all is doing something perfectly legal and above board (excepting those who blatantly spam via email or deliberately ignore rules) and is legitimately trying to earn some money. For me, my affiliate marketing helps to feed my family, pay my bills and sometimes brings in enough here and there for some little luxury or another. Generally though it’s just a much needed and far from excessive income.  Apparently, to some people, I should not  have the right, the desire or the opportunity to provide for my wife and son, put gas in my truck, keep the lights on and a roof over our heads through such methods!

I guess when you look at it that way it’s pretty disgraceful what I do huh?

When the U.S. announced the FTC guidelines it was imposing on affiliates I was quite astounded and yet most people mutely accepted one more totalitarian interference into their personal freedoms. The guidelines are ridiculously draconian and as far as I can see, their sole aim is to make it virtually impossible for the little guy to earn a buck. It has gradually crept into more and more corners of the affiliate marketing world and although I have disclaimers on all my sites, I do not see why I should have to put a disclaimer under every single article I write on my website, which I pay for and maintain, to the effect that I am a sleaze ball who will earn a few pennies if you click on my link and subsequently buy something. Excuse me but screw that. When a “celebrity” of some flavour or another is paid huge sums of money to wear a particular brand of anything, or to endorse something they have never, and would never use, does everyone demand they make a grovelling statement justifying their actions? Of course they don’t, because in this world their are rules and laws for some but a completely different set for others. The FTC has basically attempted to criminalize anyone who promotes a product or service and receives a commission for doing the work. Do we criminalize companies for working for commissions? Of course we don’t. Is an insurance broker required to tell every customer that if they use their services they, lowlifes that they are, will be paid a commission? Of course they don’t. So why are the rules different for the little guy, sitting at home and promoting products and services on behalf of another party in consideration of some relatively small financial reward should they make sales or referrals? The hypocrisy and double standards are disgusting in my opinion. Add to that the fact that I am not a US citizen, what right does the FTC have to dictate what is “law” to me?

A lot of this of course is down to some of the extremely poor quality products that are peddled by some people but there seems to no longer be any kind if distinction between those who will try to push all kinds of rubbish to make a buck and those who promote quality products and services. I realize there is a big difference between promoting every rehashed ebook or latest potions, lotions and other such scams and introducing people to decent and useful products and services that are actually worth spending money on. Speaking personally I can’t afford to buy and test every single item I may promote but I do actually purchase and use many of the things I sell as an affiiliate and for the things  don’t have direct experience of I try to do my research carefully in an honest attempt to avoid the rubbish.

Before I sat down to create this post I did a littleonline research and read several articles and blog posts painting all affiliates and the products they promote with such a broad brush it was laughable. Sadly though a lot of people will read such sweeping generalizations and stereotypes and repeat them parrot fashion to anyone who will listen. One critic even went as far as to say that nothing available to buy online that is promoted by affiliates is worth buying and is all crap. Interesting. I would guess that huge retailers such as Amazon might contest that little pearl of wisdom. It is all very well to bash affiliates but give only a very narrow definition of the topic as the majority of  articles did – invariably choosing the kind of person,  “products” and outright scams being pushed at the sleazy end of the scale. Affiliates sell all manner of physical and digital products and services and it is simply disingenuous to publish sensationalist anti affiliate propaganda citing one affiliate, one product, one shady method etc. and use that to insinuate that it is a remotely fair or balanced summary of the affiliate marketing model.

Nowadays, if you decide you want to try your hand at affiliate marketing, there are far more obstacles in your way than there were ten years ago. Every day new affiliate programs come online and for good reason. It makes sense to leverage the potential millions of users online today to spread the word about your business, service or products. At the same time however, those running the affiliate networks do little to protect such a valuable resource. It is no wonder that many who set out on the path, eventually give up or earn so little it is hardly worth their time or effort. If you are considering giving it a go, it is more important now than ever to own your own sites because virtually every third party service out there today will not have your best interests at heart and unless you control and own your own virtual real estate you will struggle constantly. It seems the affiliate Nazis have got their way. One can only hope they will move on in time and find some other poor unfortunates to marginalize, hate and attack. Maybe in the future they will find themselves in such a group, singled out for the bile and vitriol of others. After all, every one of us is in a minority of some kind or another. Those with extreme views (often ill advised or rooted in ignorance) and who adopt the “anti anything I don’t happen to agree with or even necessarily understand”, would do well to remember that when they engage in their obnoxious persecutions based on their twisted need to feel superior to others.

PDFBrander is an excellent server side PDF rebranding solution for webmasters and bloggers. Unlike traditional rebranding tools which invariably require the end user to download a PDF file and an executable rebranding program, PDFBrander offers a much cleaner and simpler solution.

PDFBrander is a script that requires installation on your server but it is extremely simple to set up and there is no need to mess with databases or anything very technical at all.  The script is well supported with very thorough video and PDF documentation so even the less technical should have no difficulties getting it set up.

Once installed PDFBrander is also simple to use from the built in control panel.

Once you have created your PDF, the script will find all the hyperlinks within the document and offers you complete control over which of those links will be rebrandable. You can choose to let the end user replace both full URL’s or a selected segment.

After completing the simple form, your rebrandable documents are then ready for people to download and can be integrated into your website in a variety of ways. You can see an example of how this works on a WordPress powered site at the following link on one of our own articles here – it will open in a new window for you:   Twitter & WordPress Marketing

As you can see, all the end user has to do is add their own affiliate links, click a button and their personalized copy becomes immediately available for download. There is no complicated software for them to install and no messing about figuring out “placeholders” or how to format their links. This ease of use makes it much more likely that your affiliates and visitors will make use of the service and that others will do the same.

viral marketing of this nature is extremely effective but only if it is made as simple as possible for people to use. PDFBrander provides that simplicity. If you have an affiliate program of your own, think how much this will help your affiliates to promote on your behalf and the likely increase in exposure and traffic you can generate. Even if you don’t have an affiliate program, rebrandable reports are a great way to encourage others to promote your PDF’s as they have an incentive to do so in the form of their own links being contained in the reports.

You can read the official promotional material below. Overall we can highly recommend the script to affiliate program owners and anyone who is interested in generating more traffic through viral marketing with rebrandable PDF documents and you know that this comes from a customer with genuine hands on experience of the product.

You can use existing PDF documents or create new ones. If you are looking for a good PDF creation software we use a free program which makes it extremely easy to create PDF’s and in the spirit of sharing we have made it available for you to download through the following link:

Get Easy PDF Maker Here.

You can download your copy of PDFBrander Here

Free PDF Report You Can Rebrand and Share

If you are using either Twitter or WordPress or both, this new short report will help you to get the most out of both. Whether you are looking to drive more traffic to your WordPress powered sites or to your affiliate marketing offers, the tips and tools in this concise guide will help.

The report is 18 pages in length and introduces some of my own tried and tested methods but will hopefully inspire you to do some creative thinking yourself.

You can download a copy of the Twitter and WordPress marketing report, rebranded with your own affiliate links (See the form below) and you are free to use your branded copy in your own promotional and marketing efforts. Rebranding is a simple case of adding your own affiliate links in the boxes filling out the captcha and downloading your PDF.

When you give away your branded copy containing your links, you can pass on the same rebranding rights to your visitors, subscribers, readers and customers.

Such rebrandable PDF books and reports can be a great draw and the simplicity of the brand new server side branding method we have installed makes the whole process far less painful than the more traditional branders that made people jump through so many hoops that they often lost heart and never rebranded anything.

With a few mouse clicks this report can be personalized and downloaded ready to be shared. No complicated brander software to download to your machine and no learning curve. This will encourage your visitors to rebrand and pass along the report and heightens interest in your own blogs and sites by virtue of the fact that you offer something of perceived value.

Try it for yourself and see how simple it is.

You can then use the report in a variety of ways – add it to your blog as a gift, share i with your subscriber list, add it to giveaway events, use it as an opt-in reward to build your own list, write a post about it and link to the download. Those are just a few of the things you can do to increase the viral effect of your report and how you can achieve a viral effect for your affiliate links. Think creatively!

We will be offering more ebooks and reports as time goes by so please subscribe and be the first to know – the early bird catches the  worm!

(IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do not have a Clickbank affiliate link you can get one here and you can get a free SocialOomph account here

If you leave any of the boxes empty the links in your PDF will not work correctly)

QR Codes are gradually becoming more and more familiar both online and off and they can be extremely useful and profitable. Now that they are mor

e widely recognized, they are becoming even more so.

If you are not familiar with QR Codes yet, they are basically a simple bar code that can be scanned using modern smart phones and you can embed within those codes all kinds of messages, web addresses, phone numbers etc. They are commonly used to provide exclusive offers and many big name companies are now utilizing them on offline advertising materials. You can use them online, add them to signatures, use

them as profile images, print them and distribute them offline, use them on business cards, posters, flyers etc.

Sample QR Code

For the non technical it might seem like wizardry and seemingly complex but if you know how to create codes you can often sell them to local businesses anxious to mimic the big boys or simply to widen their audience.

There are plenty of online generators now but what we have here are two QR Code generators that you can install on your computer enabling you to create unlimited codes containing whatever you choose. One is a WordPress plugin and will work right from you WP dashboard allowing you to quickly create multiple QR codes of various types which will then be easily accessible from within your WordPress admin area.

I hope you will find them useful – with a bit of imagination, QR Codes can be extremely good tools to have in your marketing arsenal. I’ve also thrown in some great little niche marketing bonuses within each download which you’ll have access to when you download either software.

Download QR Code Easy – Click Here

The following video is a quick demo of the WPTagz plugin. This version is not rebrandable but is fully functional and works exactly as shown in the video.

Download WPTagz QR Code Generator For WordPress

Related articles

• Codee Software Launches Business Edition QR Code Product (prweb.com)

Our Limitless Profits review is based on our actual experience of the product which we purchased simply in order to prepare an honest and fair assessment of what the program offers.

Like many Clickbank products, the sales page offers only slight clues as to what  you might expect to find inside and makes many of the usual claims although the presentation video is keen to point out that this is not a “push button” software – let’s face it, most of us know that that kind of thing doesn’t really exist.

Limitless Profits is aimed squarely at those who are just entering the world of affiliate marketing and after watching the sales video we were keen to take a look inside and see what they were offering, particularly as it is sold on the basis that you will not need a domain, hosting, or a website.

I’m pleased to say that this claim is true. The system that they are offering relies far more on viral marketing methods and is delivered via a WordPress powered membership site. Once logged in you will have access to a thorough video training section which clearly lays out what you need to do and it is basically pretty simple stuff.

The membership costs $47 one time, or, if you click to close the window, you will get the $10 discount on the second page, so, basically, it’s going to cost you $37.  Is it worth it?

To be honest, yes, it’s worth the small one time investment. Some of the content might not be new to the more experienced marketer but such customers will still find it useful as the software will save you a lot of time in setting up viral marketing campaigns. It really is just a case of point and click. Many of the affiliate programs you will be utilizing are well known and you may well be using them already.

The system offers some clever and useful ideas into how to achieve everything you need without shelling out any additional money whatsoever. There are a couple of minor problems which I can’t really talk about without giving too much away but they are minor and do not detract from the total package.

So, does it do what it claims? Well, we spent an evening going through the videos, skipping some of the stuff we already knew but we did indeed learn some new things and were impressed with the content and the software that is the key – certainly in a time saving sense. We set up all our campaigns within an hour or so and then began the promotion process. There is absolutely no reason why the program shouldn’t deliver what it claims it can. How fast it will do so is dependent on many factors but in terms of returns vs time and effort spent it is well worth it.

After purchase you can expect the usual upsell and it’s an expensive one although probably worth it if you can afford it. However there is absolutely no need to buy anything other than the product itself which, in these days of deceit and misdirection, is a refreshing change.

If you are a struggling Clickbank affiliate, this program will certainly help you make sales but it’s not restricted to Clickbank by any means. Expect to spend a short time watching the videos, completing the necessary affiliate account registrations if you’re not already using them and then the rest of the time promoting your campaigns – the more you put in to spreading your viral campaigns the better but this can be spread out over days or weeks or you can get stuck in and spend some intensive online time setting up the promotions.

Limitless Profits – Click Here Now To Visit

Overall we’d say it’s a good product for the price and worth investing in. We will watch our own affiliate campaigns carefully and see how well it performs in the real world but we have reasonable expectations that it will deliver sales and commissions over the course of time.

Related articles

• How To Achieve Higher Revenue as A Clickbank Product Vendor (articles.thecaymanhost.com)
• How To Make Bigger Profits With ClickBank (ronmedlin.com)
• This Weeks Top Five E-Marketing Products on ClickBank (desktopserver.com)

Free PDF niche marketing reports and ebooks for bloggers and affiliate marketers are extremely useful in a variety of ways and as it’s been a while since I gave anything away I thought it might be nice to share a collection of niche reports that you can download immediately and use to promote your own site, opt-in list or whatever.

There’s no catch here, you can use any of these free reports as your own giveaways and rewards, you can even add them to free giveaway events if you choose.

No opt-in is required. The link below is a direct download.

The free reports cover a variety of niches so hopefully there is something useful for everyone. They are all contained in one zip folder that can be downloaded from the link below:

 Click To Download Your Free PDF Ebooks Here

Inside you will find the following free reports, all of which you may give away or even sell if you wish. You may use them in free marketing giveaway events, use them to build your list, offer them to your own website visitors and social networks. I hope you will find some of them useful and as you can see, some of the most popular niche markets are catered for.

Below is a sample of just one of the titles to give you an idea of the type of content you can expect – this is the Membership To The Bank report and is best viewed by clicking on the full screen mode:

The other included titles are listed below:
twitter Marketing Mastery
JV Fast Profits
Membership To The Bank
Domain Flipping Treasure Map
Work At Home Maximum Profit
Facebook Marketing Profits
Hand Over Fist Moneymakers
Work  At Home Maximum Profit
PLR Godfather
Building The Business Brain
Offline Super Cash
Fitness Resolution Fortress
The Basics Of Bodybuilding
The Beginners Guide To Golf
The Basics Of Forex
Energy Efficient Home Ideas
Super Speed Dating Secrets
Authority Anthem
Courage and Confidence
How To Make Her Fall For You On The First Date
10 Sure Shot Ways To Get Your Ex Back Within One Week

video Review Of  This Excellent video Marketing Software

Traffic Player review – A WordPress plugin that enhances videos from YouTube and any other video sources watch the video now for full details of this excellent video marketing software and how it can increase traffic and sales to any videos.

Would you like to sell your ebook on Clickbank for free – without the normal upfront registration costs, marketing costs, website and sales pages creation and all that hassle? I got an email recently from Harvey Segal and I always have time to read emails from this guy because his advice is invariably good.

If you’re ready to submit your book and start making money and don’t want to read all this stuff just click here to sell your ebooks online for free

If you’ve never heard of Mr Segal he’s the man behind such gems as Clickbank For Newbies and the Ultimate Supertip both of which have helped a lot of people to make money online. When it comes to Clickbank this is on expert you should take notice of, he runs the Ultimate Guide To Clickbank and it’s as valuable and relevant today as it was when he first launched the site – don’t be fooled by the simple, some might say ugly website design – the content outshines the look and lets you get right to the meat of making money on Clickbank fast. I’ve made money with all of Harvey’s products and recommend them highly.

Anyway, on to the latest email, the reason you came here you want to publish an ebook, sell an ebook online, perhaps sell an ebook on Clickbank and leverage the huge power offered by their affiliate network.

The problem is you’re on a very tight budget, maybe you’re great at writing, you have a great subject and valuable information, but you’re not so hot on how to publish and sell online.

Want To Sell Your Book On Clickbank? Click Me Now

Well,  you’re in luck having landed on this page today. If you’re comfortable with setting up a sales page, marketing and paying a fee to get your books published in the Clickbank marketplace you might like to read my post about Creating Your First Ebook but if all that is too much trouble and is just standing in the way of selling what you have written we can take care of it all for you with a brand new service.

This brand new service isn’t going to cost you anything up front. That’s right, we’re going to show you how to submit your ebook to this new site where they will take care of all the technical, nerdy marketing and up front costs for you.

Sound good? You bet it’s good – that’s why we’re recommending you check it out now if you have a book you’ve been wanting to sell already but just haven’t got past the final hurdles or if you are looking to sell a book you’re working on right now or planning for the future.

Head over to We Sell Your Books – it’s a simple looking site but it’s consequently easy to navigate. You could submit your book in the next couple of minutes and be making money this week.

Good luck and please let us know if you found this post useful – share it and help your friends and readers make some money online.

If you are seeking an easy way to incorporate attractive and effective links to all your social networking and bookmarking sites in your email signature, this Firefox extension is going to be right up your alley.

Wisestamp is a free add on for your Firefox browser which enables you to easily create a professional looking email signature that features links and icons to not only your twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts but will also let you display links to your latest blog posts and sites you have recently bookmarked on a wide range of social bookmarking services.

As you can see from the screen shot to your left, (click it for a larger view) once you install and configure the add on, all your social networking and bookmarking links will be automatically displayed in your signature whenever you compose a new email. In this case it is a Yahoo mail account but the extension will do exactly the same for Gmail, Hotmail and AOL mail.

If that wasn’t enough it will also allow you to add your signature to just about any webpage (as long as it supports HTML), such as Google Docs, Zoho Docs and similar.

Setting up the service is as easy as 1-2-3 and once you’ve spent a couple of minutes configuring the options you can forget about it. If you want different signatures for personal and business emails, no problem, it can do that too.

Once again Firefox gives us another great way to improve the browsing experience and a surefire method of spreading the word about your social networking activity, be it business related or not.

To get the extension and start socializing your email signatures just head over to WiseStamp and get started.

I am pleased that after our intervention, both organizations were willing to liaise with one another in order to fix something that was outside the control of all the Clickbank affiliates who would have been adversely affected. Thanks for listening, SmallRivers.com and Clickbank!

–

Paper.li is, on the face of it, a great service and a cool idea.

Basically the service allows users to produce a daily, weekly or monthly newspaper style webpage on the fly using managed content from various social networks including twitter and Facebook. After signing up for a free account all the user has to do is specify a few parameters instructing the site where to pull content from and it will do the rest.

The service will also auto tweet each new issue and mention Twitter users whose content has been featured.

It is proving popular because it is easy to set it and forget it and it does give some great fresh exposure on Twitter in particular.

BUT, and it is a big BUT, there is a problem under the hood of Paper.li and it affects affiliate marketers in a big way, certainly if you are a Clickbank affiliate. Paper.li does not parse affiliate links correctly and appears to strip out affiliate ID’s, so when your link is featured on ANY Paper.li page, you will not get credit for the sale.

As you have no control over when and where your affiliate links might appear, the service is, in theory, robbing every Clickbank affiliate of their rightful sales and income.

Every time you tweet a CB link, either raw or redirected, it can appear on a Paper’li page, of which there are now a huge number and which is growing all the time. All that nice free exposure however will not do you one bit of good.

We have been exchanging emails with the company for almost two months but still there has been no resolution and invariably as soon as we stop writing they just go back to ignoring the problem.

If you are affected by this, we suggest you check any links you can find that are syndicated on Paper.li sites and then write to the company yourself if you see the same issues. To do this just click on the article title and then click through to the Clickbank secure order page for the product – your affiliate ID should be visible at the foot of the page but in all likelihood it will say “none” if you have arrived via Paper.li.

The problem may affect other affiliate links too although we are still testing results from other networks – we advise you to do the same.

After a fruitless exchange of emails with Paper.li representatives who have confirmed that it is a bug, the situation remains unchanged as of September 8 2011.  Having opened a ticket with @ClickBank we are reminded once again how frustrating it is to deal with their support system an customer service reps who seem to have no idea when it comes to technical issues. So far all I have had back from them is canned instructions on how to create a hoplink!!!

I think I’ve been at this game long enough to have figured that one out guys! I have tested this on three different machines using various browsers and the end result is always the same. Paper.li takes the link that was originally posted on Twitter, shortened or otherwise and it works as it should if you click through from the hover popup by the author icon. Most Paper.li visitors won’t do this of course, they will just click on the article title and that is where the problem lies as for some strange reason the Paper.li platform breaks those links and strips out the referring affiliate‘s ID.

I hope that both parties will get together and address this issue as it is affecting every single Clickbank affiliate out there even if they have never even heard of Paper.li.

Having mentioned this on Twitter, the initial response from Clickbank was, quote:

“@caymanhost Sorry, but unfortunately we don’t have any control over how paper.li handles affiliate links! Not much we can do there”.

Fortunately this response was not indicative of Clickbank’s view eventually and as you can see from the update at the beginning of this post they stepped up and resolved matters in conjunction with Paper.li and SmallRivers.com.

For some people it is and if you are one of those people, the aim of this hub is to give you a very quick and bare bones guide on the subject along with the tools you’ll need to get the job done.

Keyword research is important if you are involved in niche marketing or article marketing, pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, or even if you are an Adsense publisher.

The problem with the whole keyword research topic is that although quite a bit has been written about it and how important it is, there are not many really good explanations about what you should actually be doing. Sure there are plenty of links to keyword tools and software, but very little on how to use them to your advantage.

I’m going to try and give you a concise explanation that was given to me by someone who has a lot of experience in niche marketing and Adsense. Don’t worry, you are not going to need to be an SEO expert to follow these methods and neither will you need any expensive tools.

Photo Credit : Practicalowl

When doing your keyword research you are basically looking for two things:

1) Search Volume

2) Competition

This is vitally important and what a lot of people misunderstand and unless you research both properly, your results are likely to be mediocre a lot of the time. So, here is the quick down and dirty way to find your keywords and rank well for them.

Keyword Tools & Keyword Software

Go to SpyFu.com and type in a broad keyword covering your chosen topic and it will give you an idea of how much advertisers are paying for clicks in that given market. If you are an Adsense publisher for example, it’s a good way to see roughly what you might expect to earn for clicks on your ads. It’s a rough guide, but it will sort out the wheat from the chaff and help you avoid those five cent clicks and help you find the bigger green

Firstly you are going to need a keyword research tool. Google’s Keyword Tool is about as good as anything else, although I sometimes use the SEO Book Keyword Tool too. Both are free.

(No keyword research tool is 100% accurate by the way, they are guides that work on past data and that data is an ever shifting sea, but they are the best you’ve got).

Now you need to type in some keywords that broadly match the subject you are researching. Google will find you all the keywords it feels are relevant and make additional suggestions too. What you are looking for are those with good search volume – “good” will depend on how narrow and focused your niche is. For niche sites and articles, anything with a daily search volume of a hundred or more is worth looking at. For less long tail phrases you will probably raise that number. It’s something that you will learn with experience, but it’s not hard to pick out keywords that are getting high volume searches.

Add every one of your selected phrases to a text or csv file – you can do this easily in Google’s tool by clicking on the download links at the right hand side of the page.

Next comes the fun part. This method is not claimed to be laser targeted in terms of accuracy, it’s a bit rough really, but it works reasonably well most of the time.

Go to Google and search for each keyword you have saved to your text file. Look at the top ten results and work out the average page rank. If it is below three, keep the phrase but if it’s above four, don’t pay it any more attention. (Hint, use Firefox and download the SEOQuake add on which will then display PR and a lot more besides for each search result in Google, otherwise your research will take forever and a day).

I told you it was rough, but this competition analysis works well enough a lot of the time although there will be misses as well as hits. After you’ve narrowed down your keyword list in this way you will be working with terms that have high search volume and less competition.

By taking these steps, you will stand more chance of good SERPS results for your niche sites or articles, you will probably enjoy better Adsense revenue, and at this point you will be smiling!

That, in a nutshell, is all you need. However I’ve added some further resources that may be of interest to those who want to get even more serious with the whole keyword and SEO aspects of their site building and marketing efforts. I will probably add to these as I think of them.

Before you go there though, here are a couple of final thoughts on the whole keyword circus.

Keywords are important, that is accepted wisdom. However, there is a lot of misunderstanding about how to use them and this results in a lot of problems. Most people online are not SEO focused and therefore, you see a lot of uninformed, although sometimes justified, complaints about the whole subject of keywords. This usually arises because equally uninformed people completely misuse keywords by producing writing that they believe is aimed at search engine robots but is basically awful to read for humans.

Constructing an article or web page around keywords can often result in a mangled mess. It’s usually a result of mixing a little knowledge of basic SEO with someone who can’t write very well, with or without keywords.

Don’t overdo or “stuff” any piece of writing with so many targeted phrases that the work becomes unreadable. Repeating the same term over and over would have got you an English language fail in high school and it will return the same result from your online audience.

Oh and don’t ever write about one subject and try and keyword optimize it for something completely different. Just because you find that your proposed article generates low paying PPC ads for example. It won’t work. If someone comes looking for tips on recipes, that’s what they hope to find. Even if you could persuade Adsense that ads from ambulance chasing lawyers were relevant to your content about making the perfect rock cake, your visitors are hardly likely to click on them.

All you have to do is write a well constructed piece with a few targeted keywords thrown in, and you will get more targeted Adsense ads on your pages, better search engine ranking, and hopefully more targeted visitors.

Keyword Tools & Resources

Keyword Elite Software | Commercial Keyword Research Tool

MSN Commercial Intent Tool

Free Search Based Keyword Tool From Google

Free GTrends Tool From Wordtracker

NicheBOT | Keywords | Keyword Phrases From Wordtracker

SEMRush FREE SEO Tool For Adwords & Keyword Research

Free Report For Niche Marketers & Adsense Publishers

Clickbank CDR is something many affiliates and vendors often know little about. Clickbank articles have become commonplace but there is still a lot of misinformation spread around about the Internet’s largest digital information product retailer.

I see a lot of newbie related questions and a fair amount of unsubstantiated claims along with the usual scam type accusations being thrown around. If you are new to Clickbank or thinking about signing up as an affiliate in an attempt to make some money I hope this hub will be helpful.

Let’s get something out of the way right at the outset. There are people who make a lot of money with Clickbank, but they are almost certainly in the minority of the 100,000 plus affiliates who have a Clickbank account. It is unlikely that you are going to become one of these “super affiliates” in your first month, despite all the products out there that claim they can do just that for you.

However, if you are looking to earn some extra income, Clickbank is just another affiliate network that can help you do it. As with most affiliate networks it costs nothing to sign up, but if you are going to earn any commissions you are going to have to do some work. This is where most people fall at the first hurdle. If you are starting from a position of zero knowledge of internet and affiliate marketing, you have a lot to learn and it is going to take time.

Having said that, I am going to address an issue that is extremely controversial and has caused a lot of nonsense to be written about Clickbank claiming that it is a scam etc. etc. These claims are often made by disgruntled people who are prone to signing up for anything and everything on the web without really understanding what they are doing and, 99% of the time never reading any site’s terms of service or conditions of participation. These are the people who click on the “OK” button every time and then cry when they fall foul of a site’s rules.

You will see the relevance of this shortly, I promise

I have also seen claims by Clickbank affiliates that they are being cheated out of commissions but it all seems to be based on the number of “hops” they are getting in relation to the number of sales/conversions. From this they deduce that someone must be robbing them??? Unfortunately, in my experience, conversion rates can vary so wildly on a given product and are dependent on so many other factors that it’s a shaky foundation to base such accusations against the affiliate network. However, I digress, so let’s move on to this controversial issue….

Clickbank’s Customer Distribution Requirement or CDR

Did you know that a large percentage of Clickbank affiliate accounts, supposedly around 90%, are
inactive? It is quite a shocking statistic if it is accurate. The main reason for
this high number of dormant or inactive accounts is something that few people know or even talk about. It is however a very important part of Clickbank’s terms of service and it often proves to be a killer for many
hopeful Clickbank affiliates.

If you manage to sell an item or two on Clickbank, hold the celebrations. Before getting paid you need to need to meet the Clickbank Customer Distribution Requirement. Here is what that means, taken directly from Clickbank’s site:

“In compliance with US law, ClickBank will withhold payment of any account balance until the following criteria
is met:
* Sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers and
* Sales made with two different payment methods (either Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal). Note: PayPal
purchases do not count toward the minimum 5 different credit card numbers”.

That seems pretty clear. Most affiliate networks will require you to generate a minimum amount of commissions before you get paid but the Clickbank CDR specifically states that you must record sales from five different credit card accounts as well as sales from at least one other form of payment such as Paypal. (I find that a lot of my CB sales are through Paypal and credit cards lag a fair way behind). This in itself is not too bad if you can generate those initial sales, but the problems arise when you don’t and find your account marked as “dormant”. Basically here is what Clickbank say…

“Accounts
with a positive balance but no earnings for an extended period of time
are considered dormant. Dormant accounts are subject to a charge of $1
per pay period after 90 days of inactivity, $5 per pay period after 180
days of inactivity, and $15 per pay period after 365 days of inactivity”

This is the major cause of Clickbank affiliates losing heart and giving up. Many disgruntled people then sound off and complain bitterly of mistreatment by Clickbank. In short, they didn’t read the terms and fail to understand why those terms exist.

Clickbank are not perfect by any means. One of the other biggest complaints you will hear about them from both vendors and affiliates is that they stubbornly insist on allowing people to buy through their own affiliate link. Because of this policy, they came up with CDR, to prevent people from opening an affiliate account just to buy through their own link and pay a fraction of the product’s cost by earning commissions on each purchase.

So, you could say that CDR is a band-aid to fix a problem of the company’s own making.

Whatever your view, that’s the way it is for now so you have to work within those parameters. If you are suffering with a dormant account or think that you could well find yourself in the position at some point in time, you are going to need to make more sales, more quickly and that’s probably easier said than done of you are already struggling.

In an attempt to address the problem faced by so many, Harvey Segal, the author of many Clickbank ebooksand owner of a Clickbank dedicated site, the CBGuide, has come up with an ingenious answer. It is a short free report and you will not need to give out any personal information to get your copy.

I consider this an essential read for anyone working as a Clickbank affiliate or publisher/vendor. As with all of Harvey’s
offerings, it’s a very well thought out and executed product that will
genuinely help people to succeed with Clickbank. It also contains a very clever viral twist.

Download Your Copy of Clickbank For Newbies Here.

I am sure that when you have read the report you will see how it can change your Clickbank luck and help you and help you to help others. This is not another “make millions on Clickbank” publication, just a clever and simple way for struggling affiliates to get past the first hurdle and pick up their first check in the mail. Let’s face it, it’s a check you deserve if you have promoted products and made a handful of sales, and beats seeing your earnings steadily decline and dwindle away along with those aspirations and hopes of making some money online with Clickbank.

I certainly hope you will find it useful along with the other excellent resources I have listed below. These will give you further insights into affiliate marketing and Clickbank and are well worth a visit.

Now, go and earn those commissions and enjoy your first payment.

Image via Wikipedia

The announcement of Google’s latest algorithm changes designed to weed out poor quality content from what have commonly become known as “content farms” poses some interesting questions.

Early figures suggest that a number of well known and long established sites have been hit quite hard in the SERPS.  Some early indications of sites affected by Google’s content farm algorithm changes have already been published.

Certainly, the knock on effects of the change will take some time to become apparent but certainly, those who use article marketing are going to have to up their game when it comes to producing content.

Over two years ago I wrote a post entitled “article directories must raise standards” because it was only ever going to be a matter of time before the chickens came home to roost over the absolute garbage that was being passed off as content by authors, publishers, and the article directories and their editors.

It would seem that this is exactly what the latest algorithm updates are targeting – not by domain per se, but by individual pages on  those domains. With Ezinearticles marked as one of the heavy losers in the SERPS, my complaints about the decline in editorial quality control at what was once the  market leader in its field and loved by the search engines, is getting a slap for falling asleep at the wheel.

Based on early results though, if you are using article marketing as an SEO tool, there isn’t any reason to panic as long as you are submitting quality, well written articles. If on the other hand you spin crap into more crap, use rehashed PLR drivel that thousands of others have mangled before you, well, don’t expect your results to be much to write home about any longer. The abuse of what was once a wonderful system for all concerned, has, as predicted not only by me but many others, finally been tackled by Google.

It’s probably going to upset a lot of people. It will mean a lot of changes for some and hopefully it will allow article directories who publish only solid content a fair chance to rank well against the big boys who have been so dominant in the past. Good editorial practice should be rewarded, good content writing should be rewarded, and the tons of spammy, useless, marketing driven nonsense will be consigned to irrelevancy as it should have been a long time ago.

Article directory owners will need to get their act together, marketers will need to totally re-evaluate their content writing and syndication. The message is nothing new from Google – write good content for human readers and you will have no problems – we (Google) are all about producing the best, most relevant search results for our users.

I had a quick look at a couple of recent articles I had published at a few article directories, particularly those mentioned as big losers in the article linked to above. I’m pleased to say that they still appear to be ranking in the top three results for my chosen keywords which seems to endorse the view and the intention not to penalize domains in a blanket slap, only to penalize poor content published on those domains to improve the search experience.

Update: March 1st 2011

I carried out a small experiment over the last few days which seems to indicate that although most article directories are likely to be affected, some do seem to have been hit much harder than others, and although some people are claiming to understand the reasons and to predict the long term impact, things like this serve to prove that none of them are doing any more than guessing – probably a fruitless exercise,

Anyway, I wrote an article a few days ago, just before the algorithm changes hit, and submitted it to a handful of some of the top directories. The first of these was GoArticles and, as is often the case, it was published there first, literally within a few minutes. The next to approve it were ArticlesBase and Amazines, on the same day but several hours after GoArticles. Most of the others have not yet approved it.

That same day, the article was appearing high on the page one results for the targeted keyword from both ArticlesBase and GoArticles (this keyword was not particularly long tail, but was in a very particular niche with little competition or real search volume).

Today however, the GoArticles version had disappeared completely. The article was completely original and unique, and was written by myself, it was over 1000 words and, if I say so myself, very well written in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation and not stuffed with keywords but written very much with human readers in mind.

The ArticlesBase copy is holding at number four on page one of the Google SERPS.  There are absolutely no differences from the article that was published first at GoArticles – they were identical throughout.

The Amazines version has also slipped out of the first 100 results having originally been indexed on page three.

The screen shots from Alexa’s data on GoArticles are inconclusive this early after the Google changes, but although they show some notable percentage losses a day or so in in terms of reach and page views they indicate an increase in terms of their percentage of visitors from search engines since the algorithm was implemented. Looking over the longer term though, the ups and downs don’t appear to be drastically abnormal.

Fig1 -

Fig 2

Fig 3

To add even more interest to the experiment, I bookmarked the articles in a few places too and republished the article at a limited number of third party sites (content farms if you wish).

At Thoughts.com, only submitted today (several days after the article directory submissions) the post is being ranked fifth, right below the ArticlesBase item.

The Goarticles URL, bookmarked at Faves is showing up at the top of the third page of results i.e 21st position.

I didn’t post the article on the WordPress site to which the article was linking – this site already performs extremely strongly in all three major search engines and I’m sure, if I did republish it on that site it would outperform the content farms, and, if I intended to post it on the main site prior to syndicating and bookmarking it would still do so. I’m hoping that this is really what Google is trying to ensure happens going forward so that original authors and their domains rank first for their content.

So, the algorithm is definitely making its mark but is it really rather a case of  over exuberance or clumsy heavy handedness? This particular article was in the fine art niche and was a fairly in depth look at the intricacies of the fine art market in a specific country and region. I’m all for getting rid of the crappy, spun a million times dross that is the staple of many article directories and distribution services but in this case, a good and very relevant piece has been lost to Google’s visitors. To add insult to injury, the bulk of the results now showing on page after page are for sites selling posters – literally hundreds of them. This is not really a balanced search result and probably not at all what searchers would be looking for if they used the keywords/keyphrase targeted in my article.

Overall, it does seem apparent that those involved in article marketing will have to make some adjustments. My guess is that article marketing does have a future, but not for those who are not prepared to write their own quality content and restrain themselves from submitting to hundreds of directories. The article directories themselves will almost certainly have to undergo some serious quality control changes too, and doubtless, a good many will go the way of the dodo if they do not adapt. As for the countless marketers who have spent time building backlinks and traffic via rubbish articles whether or not they are about to see their efforts come unraveled only time will tell.

Do I agree with Google’s stance? In part yes, if it genuinely improves the search results and enables decently written useful content from individual bloggers as well as the big boys to beat out the shotgun approach of some of the directories and associated spammers but to be honest I’m reserving judgment until a little more time has allowed the dust to settle.

Related articles

• Google Kills eHow Competitors, eHow Rankings Up (seobook.com)
• Google Aims To Take Out Content Farms (technologyreview.com)
• Google Rolls Out Search Algorithm, Targets Content Farms (ghacks.net)
• What Google’s Crackdown on Content Farms Means for Bloggers (blogworld.com)

For a full list of all the posts just visit the Free Ebooks and Software category at the top of the homepage or from the categories menu.

Whilst some of the items may be of interest to you in their own right, the main purpose is to provide you with more resources to help you develop and improve your own sites. To this end, all of the products may be freely given away to your own blog visitors or subscribers, or be used as gifts in exchange for an opt-in to your own lists etc.

I’m kicking off with a little ebook called “Internet Marketing For Newbies”, a basic introduction to the IM world, aimed very much at beginners but it provides a reasonable overview  in an easy to digest 27 pages. Unlike many ebooks of this type it’s not stuffed with affiliate links in every sentence and keeps things simple with a basic outline of many of the things you will want to learn more about in your new internet marketing journey.

If those new to the field are part of your target audience it could be a helpful read for them. It covers the basics of affiliate marketing, social media, landing pages, email marketing, viral methods, video and SEO etc.

Also included is a complete set of sales page graphics so if you want to resell the book or use the sales page to give it away you will have everything you need – just unzip the file and you will find everything inside.

Click Here To Download – Internet Marketing For Newbies

The Indexing Tool plugin for WordPress is something that will interest anyone seeking ways to improve their website traffic and backlinks and uses some simple but clever methods to increase your website’s visibility. If you are using article marketing in your promotional efforts, sit up and take notice of this plugin because you are going to like what it can do for you and your position in the search engine results pages or SERPS.

(You can check the plugin homepage here – WordPress Indexing Tool – it will open in a new window for you).

Why? Well, whilst there is no denying that articles and content syndication are still one of the best ways to build quality backlinks to your site, there is still one fly in the ointment and it’s a very frustrating one. The fact is, while you are busy writing away and submitting all that quality content and inserting those all important backlinks, often the search engines simply won’t index those links. When that happens, whilst they are not worthless, they are not doing much to help your rankings either.

Getting Your Links Indexed Is The Most Powerful Way To Boost Your Traffic!

Your first reaction might be  be to say “yes, they already are” but then you might start to think about the “what if” scenario.. What if you have 100 articles and only half of them are actually working to push your pages up the SERPs?

Sure you will be getting some direct traffic from them, and who doesn’t like an extra 5 or so visitors a day direct from your article? But are you missing out on the 1000 visitors a day you could be getting if that link was pushing your site up to the number 1 spot in Google?

Google Does Not Index Every Page It Finds

Article sites are huge. They all have thousands of pages added to them every day.. there are hundreds of Squidoo lenses and Hubpages created every day, I hate to think how many new profiles are created everyday on various sites. Google will not index them all.

So, what can you do? Well, here’s where this simple plugin can help – if you want a more thorough explanation of the whys and hows of it all head over to the plugin homepage which sets things out very concisely.

In very simple terms, this plugin leverages the power of RSS feeds in combination with your WordPress site(s) to virtually guarantee that they get indexed. It takes your feeds, any feed, checks if the pages in it are indexed and if they are not it posts them as links on your pages. Then when Google spiders your site, it finds the links and follows them to your un-indexed pages. Google will then index those pages. It’s really that easy.

Once you install it and set up your RSS feed you can forget it. The plugin checks periodically on a timescale you select, to see if the links are indexed and if they are it removes them from your site and replaces them with new ones that still need indexing. It’s a sweet little operator. You can easily mash up several feeds to make one too and the owners of the Indexing Tool Plugin cover all of this in the accompanying video and PDF documentation.

As an added bonus you’ll also get an additional Trackback Feed plugin that creates a feed of all the trackbacks to your WordPress sites and can be used in some ingenious ways in combination with the main product.

The authors of this plugin provide some great instructional PDF’s and video, offering a lot of good ideas on how to make this plugin combination work best for you and your sites. Installation is a snap and provided you are running WordPress version 2.8 or later it will install and function without a glitch.

This is a very useful plugin and if you already understand the potential of RSS feeds you will know that this is a powerful, simple and effective method and you’re probably already on their sales page!! When choosing premium WordPress plugins it pays to select them wisely but this one really is worth your consideration. Users of all the big article directories and places such as HubPages and Squidoo along with countless other content syndication sites should really put this one on their shopping list.

Indexing Tool WordPress Plugin Can Be Found Here

TweetAdder Review

TweetAdder Review  – Free Download Here

TweetAdder Coupon Codes For 20% Off – “HOTDEAL” or “WHO20″

As a twitter user with a reasonably large following it becomes more and more difficult to manage my Twitter accounts and to try and keep pace with updates, re-tweets, follows and unfollows. This has always been my biggest problem with Twitter when it comes to using it as a business tool.

I’ve used all kinds of applications to try and make life easier, but eventually end up neglecting Twitter simply because it’s so hard to try and stay abreast of things. I’ve used free and paid tools in an attempt to increase productivity and sales via my Twitter business accounts but they always seem to fall short of what I really needed. My TweetAdder review therefore comes after many years of experience of a host of other Twitter tools and software.

Then, came the launch of TweetAdder, a software that seemed to promise so much. Being skeptical about any kind of software that claims to be “the answer” I nonetheless took a loser look at this one, because it really did seem to have the solutions to many of the problems busy Twitter users face on a daily basis.

My biggest concern with many Twitter tools is that they can end up hurting your account, even result in accounts being banned if they break the rules, despite the author’s assurances that the software is 100% compliant with the Twitter TOS.

TweetAdder came with all the usual promises and guarantees, and every TweetAdder review I studied seemed to confirm that it was a genuinely worthwhile and effective service. However, before I parted with any money for what could well have been just another flash in the pan, I downloaded the free demo so that I could give it a trial run on one of my business accounts. Well, after the short demo period expired, I logged into PayPal and bought a full license straight away – it really is that good.

Tweetadder doesn’t use the Twitter API like so many other offerings and this is a great benefit. The software can basically automate everything from tweeting, direct messaging, following and unfollowing users, retweeting and replying. For finding targeted followers based on keywords either from tweets or user profiles it is unbeatable.

Since using the licensed version of the software it has increased my targeted followers in various niches and increased my conversions on various affiliate products in a quite impressive fashion. As for increases in daily traffic to certain websites, it has performed admirably well. I have to say that overall I’m pretty chuffed with my purchase and recommend it unreservedly as probably the very best Twitter management software on the market today. I’ve yet to read a bad TweetAdder review and the only reason I can honestly see anyone writing one is if they are a competing product!

As with all things online, constant changes will probably mean that one day, someone might come up with something vastly superior to TweetAdder but until they do, well, shouldn’t you be giving your online business the edge that it undoubtedly provides? My TweetAdder review is based on personal experience and day to day usage and I can honestly say that it works, plain and simple.

I recommend that you download the free fully functional demo of Tweetadder for yourself and give it a spin – be warned though, you will probably find yourself unable to resist buying a license as soon as he demo runs out after seeing your own results. If Twitter has disappointed you as a promotional tool until now, Tweetadder could be just what you need to turn things around.

Tweet Adder Review | Free Demo – Download Here

Related articles

• Some Tactics to Get Free Tweet Apps (business.ezinemark.com)
• My Twitter Toolbox (chrisbrogan.com)
• Garin Kilpatrick: 15 Fantastic Twitter Marketing Tactics | The Twitter Tools Book (twittertoolsbook.com)

The demand for information continues to grow online and if you have knowledge of any subject that you think can help others, creating an ebook or report is a great way to share that knowledge. It can also be a profitable venture.

Before we start looking at the mechanics though, there are a couple of questions that most people ask themselves. Firstly, is there a market for what I want to write about and how much competition will it face? Personally I wouldn’t let this stand in the way of creating your first ebook. Sure you need a market but don’t worry too much about other products on similar topics. Competition doesn’t automatically mean that your work won’t do well.

Secondly, and something that often holds people back from writing an ebook, are doubts about their level of expertise. Well, again, this should not be a barrier. You don’t necessarily need to be an expert, all you need is a decent amount of knowledge. I say this because when it comes to your online audience, they will all have different levels of experience and if you can teach them more than they know already, you will find an audience.

For now there is just one more thing to consider before you begin. The purpose of your ebook and whether you intend to sell it or make it available for free. For example, you may just want to create a free document that you will give away in exchange for your visitors opting in to your list. Maybe you just want to make it a promotional vehicle for your business and will be giving a direct download link. Whatever your intentions, it is something you need to have an idea of before you begin. I’ll talk more about these options a bit later.

Creating Your Ebook – Ebooks Software

So, let’s move on to the ebook creation process.

You are going to need some software to create your digital information product but don’t worry, there is no great cost involved as you will soon see.

Most ebooks are created in PDF format and that is what we are going to deal with here. There are plenty of PDF Creation software titles available and all authors have their preferences, but, as a first time author, you probably want to keep your initial investment in your product to a minimum level. With that in mind, I would recommend one of the following options, both for ease of use and affordability.

Open Office : Cost: FREE

Open Office is open source software so it costs nothing to download. It is a big download and offers a suite of tools as an alternative to the Microsoft Office package. It is actually very good and the word processing software includes the ability to convert documents into PDF files very easily. Whilst you can use MS Word to create your base documents, you will encounter problems when converting to PDF, particularly with any links you have put into your document. This is not good. Open Office will convert all of your live links without a problem.

Once you have downloaded the software, open up the word processor. Much of it will be familiar. All you need to do is compose your document including images, links etc. and when you are ready to convert it to PDF, click on File—->Export To PDF. (There is a PDF button on the menu bar but if you want to add password security to your document, use the option I’ve just mentioned).

eWriterPro : Cost $5.00

I recommend eWriterPro and use it myself because it’s a fantastic piece of software. If you are reluctant to install something as large as Open Office and use up all that disk space, eWriter Pro is a great alternative. The program is a self contained PDF creation tool that includes it’s own word processor with a WYSIWYG interface. All you need to do is open it up, compose your work and click a button to convert it to the finished article.

It really is very simple to use and makes adding images and links to your documents a breeze. Well worth the very small investment if you don’t want to use Open Office on your computer.

That’s it, it’s all you need to create your PDF document. So what else do you need to know?

viral Marketing & Rebranding Issues

If you are planning on using a report or ebook as a promotional vehicle you may wish to consider making it rebrandable. This will increase the chances of others promoting it on your behalf.

You will need additional tools to accomplish this, and one of the most common is ViralPDF

Alternatively the Ultimate Rebrander might be a better solution depending on your target market and their likely technical savvy. Check them both out and see which best suits your needs, they are both excellent tools.

Rebranding software enables you to select links within your book or report that can be changed by those who download it. It is commonly used for affiliate links. Let’s say your book includes some links to Clickbank products or similar. By allowing others to insert their own referral links, you provide them with a great incentive to pass your book on to others. Of course, you will want to ensure that some links remain your own so a balance needs to be struck between the links that benefit you and those that you enable people to change.

Make life easy for affiliates – offer easily rebrandable reports or sales pages with PDF Brander

Presentation

I can’t stress enough how good graphics will enhance your product’s image and increase sales. If you are planning to sell your ebook, good graphics are a must.

eWriter Pro actually includes some help and suggestions in this area and even some free options. However, in all honesty they are not that impressive. If you are familiar with Photoshop and have the software you can search for Photoshop actions that will help you make cover images for your ebook. Try these hubs about Photoshop ebook covers here and free Photoshop Action Scripts too.

Alternatively, there are plenty of software options available for creating ebook covers if you don’t have Photoshop.

My preferred option is to get someone to do the graphics work for me and I always recommend Farihan at PixelOfGenius.com who produces excellent work at reasonable prices.

If you employ a professional to do your graphics, consider also what you are going to require. If you are going to try and recruit affiliates to sell your book, you will probably want some banners for them to use in addition to the cover images. Read on to find out more about selling your finished product.

To my mind this is probably the hardest part of making money from your new creation. You have labored over your product, polished off all the rough edges, paid someone to design your graphics, or painstakingly created your own and you feel ready to unveil it to the world.

But how do you do it? Here is a breakdown of some of the steps you could/should now take.

1) Register a relevant domain name.

If this book is going to be commercially and financially important it would be really wise to register a domain name for your product. You can do this very cheaply, so it’s well worth the small outlay, around ten dollars a year. Choose a domain name that is close to or includes your book’s title. People who land on your sales page may not buy on their first visit and the easier you make it for them to remember where they found it, the better.

If you are just creating a free report, you could probably use a sub-domain or sub-directory on an existing domain if you have one.

2) Create A Sales Page

At this point it might be a good idea to set up an opt-in page, using your header and cover graphics. The reason for this is to start getting the word out about your new book, even if you’re not ready to start selling it yet. Once you have a page that describes your book or report, you will need to promote it. Do this first and work on your actual sales page once you get this underway.

Write about it on your blog, use forums on relevant subjects and post links and use any methods you can to send people to your new opt-in page. The idea is that you want potential buyers to join an early notification list, offering them the chance to be the first to know about your book when it becomes available. The idea is to create “buzz” or interest in your new book. It is not essential, but it’s well worth considering.

You will need an autoresponder service to achieve this. Either from someone like Aweber or GetResponse or maybe a hosting company that provides a service as part of their hosting package.

Promoting takes time. Unless you already have a large targeted audience, you are going to have to roll up your sleeves and start driving traffic. Like I said, this is probably the hardest part of the whole process, but also one of the most important, along with the next step……

UPDATE : If you would like someone else to take care of all the setup and costs of selling your ebook in the Clickbank marketplace – visit this brand new service now – We Sell Your Books and you will soon be making sales with very little effort and no financial outlay. Submit your book and sit back while they do the rest for you.

Avenues Of Sale

Setting Up The Sales Process

We now come to the
actual sales mechanisms and your choices. Do you want to have
affiliates promoting and selling your book or are you just going to
sell it yourself? How are you going to process payments? All important
considerations I think you will agree.

If you just plan to sell
the book yourself and are confident that you have the skills to do so
and reach a large enough audience to achieve good sales figures all you
need is a payment processor. A lot of people going this route will use
Paypal for its ease of set up and reputation.

However, and this
is very important, you need to be able to deliver your product securely
to prevent people from sharing your download link. If you are hosting
the files on your server and providing a static download link, it won’t
be long before that link becomes public knowledge and everyone and
their aunt are getting your work for free.

So,let’s look at solving the problems of sales and product delivery. Again there are many options open to you.

1) SmartDD Digital Download Protection and Sales System

You can download SmartDD for free and use it with up to five products. The script needs to be installed on your server, but once done it automates the sales process for you. It works with PayPal and Clickbank and you can even set up a simple affiliate program, create an online store for your ebooks and more. It’s a great tool, particularly as it’s entirely free. If you want to sell more than five products you will need to buy the pro version, but the free version is fully functional and can be used without any time restrictions or other silliness.

A great time saver and solves many problems all in one.

If you are using WordPress and want a simple plugin that can deal with secure delivery of digital products take a look at this neat and free option – very simple to use and limited in features but it works:  Paid Downloads WordPress Plugin

2). Selling Through Clickbank

The advantage of selling through Clickbank is, purely and simply, their huge band of affiliates. It’s not too difficult to set up the process, particularly if you use SmartDD but the real problem is persuading people to promote it in the first place. Products that do not do well are removed from the marketplace and sales will quickly dry up. You also have to consider pricing carefully and the levels of commission you are willing to pay.

Clickbank Results is a very good manual for Clickbank vendors which will give you a lot of advice on how to ensure your ebook doesn’t get lost in the thousands of other products available for their affiliates to promote.

3) Creating Your Own Affiliate Program

As already mentioned, SmartDD can handle a basic affiliate set up and there are various other software options that can help you. Some of the high end software is very expensive but for modest prices you could consider the following systems. All have their benefits, and some will suit some people better than others.

Rapid Action Profits is a very comprehensive tool for marketing and selling your products online. It’s relatively expensive but if you’re intending to sell several products, there isn’t anything much better than this feature rich system.

7 Dollar Secrets is a simpler and cheaper option than RAP but works very well for many publishers. As title suggests, it’s seven dollars

4) Using A Third Party Outlet

There are also third party services available who will help you sell and deliver your digital downloads, one of the most popular being E-Junkie who will take care of pretty much everything for you, in consideration of a small monthly fee.

If all of the technical stuff frightens you, this might be the best solution for you as it eliminates a lot of what I’ve discussed in this article. Then again, there is a lot of satisfaction in doing it yourself and a huge sense of accomplishment when your efforts start translating into sales.

It’s different strokes for different folks, but you now have some of the best resources at your fingertips.

I Hope you have found this post useful. If you have, please share it freely

Further Reading and Resources

1) Ebook Money Machine – Another cheap report on how to make money with ebooks.

2) First Ebook Now -  A good guide to creating your first ebook at a very reasonable price ($7) to expand your knowledge even further and give you a little more detail.

I promised after my last post to give an update on the affiliate link cloaking complications caused by certain browsers not accepting cookies from “third party sites”. In simple terms, if you are using frames to cloak your affiliate links, Internet Explorer may well not accept your cookie if the domain in the browser address bar is different from the URL where the cookie originates. On standard privacy settings, which most users probably won’t ever change, this should supposedly only apply to third party cookies that do not have a compact privacy policy but in practice it doesn’t always seem to be the case.

After pretty exhaustive testing, I’ve found a couple of things that work in the majority of cases – however, the problem still means that after cloaking your links you should check every one to make sure your cookie is indeed being recorded correctly.

1) The stealth cloaking option in Samurai Stealth Cloaker still delivers the goods and will normally set your cookie in IE. Check each link to make sure – I have tested using Clickbank and Commission Junction links and most were fine. However, occasionally a vendor’s link may throw things off for some unknown reason.

UPDATE: As of September 2011 SSC seems to have gone offline. We don’t know if this is permanent or not but if the links do not work for you and you are looking for a WordPress solution the Eclipse Advanced Link Cloaker may be a good alternative and comes in the form of a plugin or you could use the excellent Ninja Affiliate which has been around longer, costs less, is extremely effective and packs some great features.

If you would prefer a non WordPress alternative at a very low cost, take a look here at Affiliate Link Defender which you can pick up for less than six bucks.

If you use use the masked frame option in the script to cloak anything be sure to check very carefully in as many browsers as you can because you may possibly lose commissions from anyone using IE6 and above – the vast majority of internet users.

2) There is some software available that promises not only to ensure your affiliate cookies are correctly tracked in Internet Explorer and all other browsers but also to protect you entirely from link hijacking by parasite software installed on your visitors’ computers.

I’ve been trying this on Clickbank and Commission Junction links and in the vast majority of cases it works fine. I’ve also used it with some less well known networks without problems. However, once again, I would recommend users check their links to make sure. Keep reading for a review of the software below.

I have also been trying out cloaked links for programs using scripts such as Rapid Action Profits and the 7DollarSecret – these are affiliate programs that pay affiliates instantly, normally via PayPal and it appears that the construction of these links makes them a little trickier to cloak correctly. If you are promoting anything using either script, I would advise you to make doubly sure that you are going to receive credit and you may have to settle for using the raw link or a simple PHP redirect in some cases.

Review Of Covert Links – Affiliate Link Cloaking Software

CovertLinks is one of the latest cloaking solutions on the market from Perry Wolf and, credit where credit is due, it was his sales page that woke me up to the whole Internet Explorer cookie issues, which will teach me to keep up with the affiliate forums a little more as it has been discussed at length in several places.

However, CovertLinks goes a fair bit further than just solving that one problem and Perry claims that his methods of cloaking can also prevent parasite software from hijacking your links too. He explains how all this works, in layman’s terms on his website, but here is a summary of what CovertLinks can do – there are two methods available to you as an affiliate, HTML and PHP versions:

a) The CovertLinks HTML Version: An Advanced Framing Technology is used that displays the Merchant’s sales page on your    website in a Frame but uses additional methods to ensure your cookies get set.

b) The CovertLinks PHP Version : The PHP version uses an advanced method to “pull” the content from the merchant’s page and display it on your website without using frames. This ensures your affiliate cookies are set and provides additional security against Parasite Software.

Full explanations can be found on Perry’s website and even if you’re not convinced that you should be cloaking your links it’s worth reading.

So far my tests of the software have proved that it does exactly what it says on the tin, at least most of the time. Once again, it is not perfect and seems to struggle when dealing with more unusual affiliate links. If you are working mainly with the well known networks, you should not have too many issues. When faced with certain types of affiliate links though, just like SSC, CovertLinks is not immune from the occasional “brain fart”, or perhaps, more accurately, the links themselves are not.

Update : after a bit of back and forth with the man behind the software it seems to me, despite my non technical background, that the software can fail to pass cookies in IE. I have now tried it with all manner of affiliate links and with the default privacy settings in IE8 (based on the assumption that most users will not alter these) and CovertLinks does not always manage to get the cookies set. Reverting to a straight redirect solves the problem, but this means having to do that manually or with other software. So, here I am, using both CovertLinks and Samurai Stealth Cloaker in tandem and testing every single cloaked link I create.

This is not ideal obviously and it’s time consuming. I’m hoping that my feedback and examples of the software’s shortcomings will enable the developer to address them and remedy them in future releases, even though I got the impression that my suggestions that there were some issues didn’t go over that well.

There is one other aspect of it that I don’t like very much and that is the appearance in the title bar of the browser of “Covert Links – Show Page http://www.ehateverthelinkis.com” This doesn’t appear to happen on all links so I’m unsure if it’s intentional or if it’s a bug. IF it is intentional it is a rather silly flaw in my opinion – after going to such lengths to produce a secure link cloaking software you give the game away for the sake of advertising in the browser’s title bar? This particular issue really needs attention because, intentional or not,  it spoils an otherwise competent and good value product.

Now, as far as the protection from parasite software goes, I’m taking Perry at his word because I’m not technical enough to understand how such nasty trickery works. I’m not sure that SSC provides such protection, it doesn’t claim to, but that’s not to say it doesn’t when using the stealth mode.

I’m keen to use CovertLinks, as it does solve, at least in the main, a couple of pretty serious problems for affiliates. Sadly, unlike SSC, which is a script that resides on your server, CovertLinks is software that runs on your computer. I say sadly because in terms of ease of us, convenience and tracking, it is far less user friendly than the script. Each cloaked link has to be created using the software’s interface – basically a box filling and checkbox ticking exercise – which is pretty simple. You will then need to upload the resulting file to your server, either via FTP or through your hosting control panel.

This is a gripe that I probably wouldn’t have if I had never used SSC – it’s not really a big deal, it just seems laborious because with SSC you can create your links far more quickly and keep track of them far more easily using the simple admin panel which also gives you basic tracking facilities.

Having said that, CovertLinks certainly seems to be a more up to date method of cloaking and the way things on the web progress, it’s a good idea to keep up with current technology. If parasite software is as big a problem as some people are claiming, anything that can beat it is a good thing in my book.

The good news about CovertLinks is that it is pretty cheap, certainly compared to many other cloaking solutions, many of which are actually pretty useless in any case. As to whether it is better than SSC or equally as good, both methods have their advantages and disadvantages and choosing between the two is going to come down to what each individual considers more important to them, and perhaps budget. In terms of price, CovertLinks is a clear winner, but when weighing up the differences, SSC might still edge it out for some users. The choice, as they say, is yours.

TCH

Parasite software is a program installed on a user’s computer that can do some very underhand things. Basically, if the software recognizes an affiliate link, it can insert its own cookie in replace of yours, effectively stealing your commissions from right under your nose and neither you, or your visitor/referral will know a thing about it.

That is pretty serious and perhaps far more of a real threat than someone manually altering or stripping out your affiliate link. The problem is, that even if you use redirects, such parasite software can still do its dirty work.

I am currently evaluating some software that claims to overcome this problem using a whole new way of cloaking links.

The other thing I wanted to mention is Internet Explorer. I’ve never been a fan of this browser; it gives webmasters more headaches than any other browser out there – it messes up the appearance of websites and I recently discovered, by chance, that if you redirect a link using a frame, which is a very common way of handling affiliate links, IE will potentially block cookies, (supposedly ony third party cookies that do not have a compact privacy policy) robbing you of your referrals and commissions! This sucks big time as the vast majority of internet users who don’t know any better still use this crappy piece of software because it came installed on their computer.

Having said that, Clickbank and CJ links should be OK…..however, when testing in IE8, results are inconclusive – some cookies were set when using a frame and some were not. Why? I have no solid explanation but whatever, if you are using frames to cloak your links, it would pay you to check them in various browsers to ensure your cookie is being set correctly.

If you are using masked frames to redirect your links, go and check them in IE now. Once your page loads, look in the bottom of your browser for a small eye shaped icon – if it’s there, double click it and you will probably see that your affiliate cookie has been completely stripped out. If it has, you may need to change all those masked frame links to a simple PHP redirect – the least secure redirect there is, just so that IE users will be credited as your affiliate referrals. Alternatively, try the stealth cloaking option in Samurai Stealth which seems to solve the issue most of the time.

UPDATE: As of September 2011 SSC seems to have gone offline. We don’t know if this is permanent or not but if the links do not work for you and you are looking for a WordPress solution the Eclipse Advanced Link Cloaker may be a good alternative and comes in the form of a plugin or you can try the very effective Ninja Affiliate which is still the one to beat in terms of redirect plugins and comes highly recommended. There is also a good video demo of Ninja Affiliate in action here

If you would prefer a non WordPress alternative at a very low cost, take a look here at Affiliate Link Defender which you can pick up for less than six bucks.

Can you imagine how many sales you may have lost because of Microsoft and their decision to implement such a feature in their browser? When I found out I was more than a little mad – thanks a bunch Microsoft for screwing affiliates the world over.

The problem of parasite software is made even worse when using simple PHP redirects because your cookie does not get processed until your visitor actually lands on the page – the parasite does its work before this happens meaning you have no chance whatsoever!!

Now, the product I am currently evaluating claims to have all the answers to these problems but I’m not ready to share it yet because in early tests, I’m not convinced and IE8 still seems to be blocking cookies on my redirects, whether HTML or PHP. Having said that, the testing process is a bit of a complicated one and I’m hoping that after some dialogue with the program owner, these difficulties can be resolved. If or when they are, I will publish my findings here.

In the meantime, the best advice for all affiliates would be not to use masked frames as a form of redirect, certainly not without testing them fully in the major browsers,  and to check all your existing framed links and redirects very carefully, in particular in Internet Explorer, because you could be cutting your own throat and losing commissions as a result of trying to do the exact opposite! Thanks Microsoft.

TCH

IMPORTANT UPDATE: As of September 2011 SSC seems to have gone offline. We don’t know if this is permanent or not but it is certainly a shame and we have no idea what the reasons for the site’s disappearance may be. The script is still working just fine for us. However, if the links to the program do not work for you when you visit and you are looking for a WordPress solution we’ve added a couple of options for you. Fairly new is the Eclipse Advanced Link Cloaker which may be a good alternative and comes in the form of a plugin.

The other noteworthy WordPress plugin that comes to mind is Ninja Affiliate from Max Blog Press so we’ve added a video below to help you decide if this one is for you or not. We give it a highly recommended because we know it works very well indeed and has some features you won’t find anywhere else, combining not only effective link cloaking abilities but also keyword inlinks and other nifty options.

If you would prefer a non WordPress alternative at a very low cost, take a look here at Affiliate Link Defender which you can pick up for less than six bucks.

I wrote a review of Samurai Stealth Cloaker some time ago and hailed it as the best link cloaking script on the market at the time. To date, I have still not seen anything better and I finally got around to doing a demo video which shows the script in action.

There are many good reasons to cloak affiliate links – more professional looking URL’s from your own domain, shorter URL’s, disguising your affiliate status and to a degree, helping you avoid the stripping of your affiliate ID by visitors who don’t want  you to get paid for their own unfathomable reasons.

Up to a point, the claims of commission theft are true and they also make for sensational ad copy but let’s be realistic. Average internet users wouldn’t know an affiliate link if it bit them on the a**, so if your selling something not related to internet marketing or SEO for example, it’s doubtful they are going to bypass your link. On the other hand, particularly with Clickbank products, no matter what you do, once a savvy Clickbank affiliate lands on the payment page they can easily clear their cookies and return to buy through their own link, so cloaking does not protect you from those folks at all.

One of the most valid reasons for using redirects is the management aspect of your links. Let’s say you promote a product related to WordPress – you may link to that product in a huge number of blog posts and articles, perhaps using an automatic linking plugin for instance, meaning that you could have hundreds of links on countless web pages. If that product becomes outdated, or is withdrawn from the market, or goes away for any of a variety of reasons, you either have a load of broken links to fix by trying to find and amend each one, or you just leave the broken links littering your content – not a great option.

If you use redirects, all you ever have to do is change one link and all the instances of that redirect will automatically be updated. Using a script like Samurai Stealth Cloaker enables you to login to your admin panel and with a couple of mouse clicks all your redirects are changed in seconds. That is a very worthwhile plus point, and the more affiliate links you generate over time, the more important it becomes.

SSC is very easy to install on your server and once it’s done, you can see from the video how easy it is to use. We’ve chosen a complicated scenario in the video, basically to show the power of “stealth” redirects and the fact that once you have placed your affiliate cookie, you can send a visitor to absolutely any page you like – great if the sales page is crap, or you’ve maybe done all the preselling in a review on your own site for example. In our example we show how you, the affiliate, can send someone to your own opt-in page, capture the lead, and then send the visitor straight to the sales page as opposed to the merchant’s lead capture page, or even straight to the order page.

The script can also handle simple PHP redirects or mask your link in a frame (we would not recommend using frames however – see this post on cloaking links and Internet Explorer which explains why) but the stealth option is what makes the script most powerful. In rare cases however, the stealth link may break an affiliate link so it’s always wise to double check your redirect before publishing it to the world. In my experience with SSC it has handled various networks with no problems at all and I’ve only ever had a couple of affiliate links where it broke something along the way. Just be aware that it can happen.

Here’s the video demo of Samurai Stealth Cloaker

I’d also like to mention another redirect script that I use in certain circumstances, particularly when I’m sending customers or visitors to a download – you’ll see how you can add one time offers and instead of just seeing a click to download box pop up, your visitor views another offer or offers while they wait for their product delivery. It seems to work pretty well if you keep the offers relevant. (Sorry but I have withdrawn the sales page for this tool as interest tailed off considerably in the past couple of years)

First off, we are going to be moving to a new home on the web as we have outgrown our present hosting plan – more of that in a separate post. We have suffered a lot of downtime in recent months and it as done a fair bit of damage to our rankings which is another reason why we are making the move.

I have been considering the future of this blog for sometime and although the new hosting arrangements will allow it to remain without eating up too many resources, the fact that it is a non WordPress blog is one of the reasons its future is uncertain. Moving it to WordPress is so convoluted that I doubt I will try it for this site so I’m considering all options carefully before making a final decision.

If you haven’t visited our main site recently, please drop by and see what we have been up to – a new series of video tutorials on things like WordPress, cpanel and other blogging and web hosting related subjects are to become a regular feature and are proving very popular. My blogging focus will probably shift to this site far more as the year progresses – if you are reading this post here, you can see that I am slowly moving selected content over already.

I have been busy elsewhere this past few months both online and off and my wife and I are about to open a physical offline business having launched a new website last year and the move into a retail premises is the focus of our efforts at present. We used WordPress for the site and you can visit Arteccentrix for another example of what can be done with the software and associated plugins, it really is a versatile platform – it’s not internet marketing related.

So, 2010 is going to be an exciting and busy year! I hope that all my loyal readers will stick around and enjoy it with me.

To kick off this new year I’m starting with a few tips that will help your marketing efforts online this year.

URL Redirection and Affiliate Marketing – if you are still using the TinyURL service to shorten your links you may want to rethink the idea. Why? Well, it has been a much abused service and as a result you could be losing a lot of traffic and visitors if you continue to use it. Browsers like Google Chrome now include a feature for users to preview every TinyURL as so many links led to undesirable or spammy sites. This means that instead of redirecting to your page, users will see something like the image below. This is plainly not a good thing!

So, if you’re looking for a better alternative there are plenty out there nowadays – ViralURL is one option and can help you with more than just redirection, as can the excellent and new service from Skadoogle.

However, I recently discovered that ViralURL also has problems associated with it – having been unfairly flagged (imo) by the Spybot Search and Destroy software, anyone running Spybot and Internet Explorer is unlikely to see any of your links at all. I’m not sure how many users Spybot S&D has, but it’s a pretty well known tool and it’s free. CNET alone cites the number of downloads from its sitealone at 111,925,794 so it has to be borne in mind. ViralURL id certainly going to be crippled on a lot of machines out there. Rightly or wrongly SpybotS&D have decided to “protect” their users from ViralURL links and have refused to remove the flag, despite the best efforts of ViralURL to state their case. I think the people at Spybot are morons judging by the comments they made on their forum and simply do not understand viral marketing or any form of affiliate marketing at all. Needless to say I choose to use alternative software for parasite detection.

If you want a professional link cloaking script for your own domain we still say that Samurai Stealth Cloaker is the best out there. You can visit my hub on link cloaking and redirection for more tips too.

When it comes to marketing online, your list is going to be one of the most important aspects of those efforts and if you are still baulking at the thought of getting started with your own list, make 2010 the year you get to grips with building your own list of subscribers. You can choose from countless list building programs but the bottom line is that most of them are a waste of time – sorry to say that but it’s true.

For some great listbuilding tips try Josh Spaulding’s report on email marketing, it’s a steal and contains some great information.

I’m often asked what programs and services I would recommend for beginners to the world of internet or affiliate marketing but it is such a huge subject that without a clear idea of exactly what model you are intending to use it’s very difficult to answer.

If you are just starting out, there is a very good 120 video course available called IM For Newbies that covers all kinds of topics and explains how to do a whole range of things – it’s not the most advanced stuff but if you’re wanting to accelerate your learning curve it’s very worthwhile and good value for money at only $7. For anyone wanting to learn how to set up affiliate marketing sites or niche sites, the free training videos at the Clone Cash System are well worth a look too.

If you are planning to use WordPress in your online marketing there are a huge number of free and paid resources available – take a look at my main site’s WordPress tools section and check out some of the WordPress Training videos too. You can even get a free membership site software for WordPress at Memberfire, so if you are looking to set up your first membership site for free or paying members, it’s a great place to start.

As far as free services go there are a million and one that claim to be the answers to your prayers, but they can’t all possibly be telling the truth. That’s not to say that some will work better than others for different people and their online ventures. There are literally thousands of options, tools and sites out there, so many that it can be difficult to know what to do and where to begin but my advice would be to try as much as you can cope with – test and discard anything that does not bring results. Do not just take someone else’s word all the time – if you like the look of a free service try it – there can often be some nice surprises when you do so.

You will have noticed  several buttons in the sidebar for free advertising sites – if you have no advertising budget to speak of these can be quite effective – I know because I’ve seen some good results with them in recent months so give some a try and see if they can help you too. In my experience if you have the right product/service they can be good for list building and even sales. I’m also currently trying some banner advertising with an exchange that seems to be performing reasonably well although I’ve never been a fan of such things before – it all depends on what you’re advertising but it’s a no cost way of getting your sites seen in more places and there is a WordPress plugin available too.

If you stick with me on this blog or subscribe to my list, I will post results and ideas of my own to help you further your online goals at the start of this new decade!

I’ll report back on the hosting move once it’s underway – if the new service is as good as people claim, you can be sure I’ll be giving a full and detailed review of my experiences and the services provided so look out for that in the weeks ahead.

TCH

To kick things off I am going to talk about a subject that still seems very popular and that is, the best way to cloak your affiliate links. A while back I did post about the methods I was using or had used in the past.  Since writing that post I have continued to happily use my free Cloaker Buzz Elite which does an admirable job and asserted that I would never pay for any kind of link cloaking software. Ah the famous last words of a fool eh?

Always on the look out for time saving tools and easier ways of doing things I felt sure there was a better way to not only cloak my links but make them more manageable. Affiliates will know that after a period of time the number of affiiate links they are using just grows and grows until it is almost impossible to keep up. I had reached this point when the software that is the subject of this review came to my notice.

UPDATE: As of September 2011 SSC seems to have gone offline. We don’t know if this is permanent or not but if the links do not work for you and you are looking for a WordPress solution the Eclipse Advanced Link Cloaker may be a good alternative and comes in the form of a plugin.

Samurai Stealth Cloaker, I will say right off is a fantastic little script. Note the use of the word “script” – most of the cloakers out there, including Cloaker Buzz Elite, are windows based software. CBE is great but it still requires you to generate a file and upload it to your server for every link you create which is time consuming and not very efficient. Samurai Stealth Cloaker is different and is basically a small php file that you upload to your server. It takes minutes to do and then you are set to go. Cloaking any link is a simple case of logging into the admin panel, filling out a couple of boxes and you have your cloaked link. It’s so easy and so quick I don’t know how I managed without it until now.

The program allows you to choose exactly the kind of cloaking you wish to use, from a simple redirect to a fully secure encrypted link. Redirection to any web page of your choosing makes it a very powerful little tool and I’m loving its simplicity and ease of use.

The other advantage is that every cloaked link is stored in one file, making them immediately portable between domains. Each link also contains a basic but very useful counting tracker so you can see how many clicks your links are getting.

Another great bonus is the inclusion of a script for article marketers that completely solves the problem of affiliate links in places like Ezine Articles and that in itself is worth its weight in gold if you use article marketing to promote affiliate programs.

Before buying this tool, I bought another program for $97 and it turned out to be capable of nothing more than the free software I’ve used forever! I claimed a refund quickly but the point is, don’t be fooled by the claims of most so called link cloaking programs. Most of them are a waste of money. Samurai Stealth Cloaker is the exception and is the best money I’ve spent in a while for a time saving marketing tool.

Cloaking links is essential if you are an affiliate. If you are not doing it already, I recommend you start off on the right foot with this excellent tool

The sales page is one of the most upfront I have seen in a while with detailed videos showing exactly what you are buying and how it works, enabling you to make a well informed buying decision. If only more software vendors were as transparent as Michael Andrews, the man behind Samurai Stealth.

So, there you have it if you’ve heard enough and are ready to grab your own copy you can head right on over and buy your copy of Samurai Stealth Cloaker at a discounted price for a limited time only. I endorse the product wholeheartedly for affiliates everywhere. It is a genuine bargain.

Buy Samurai Stealth Cloaker Now at the special limited time price

TCH

(IMPORTANT NOTE – remember to test cloaked links to ensure that your affiliate link is being tracked correctly. Sometimes, depending on the merchant/affiliate network, certain forms of cloaking may cause failure to track your ID – fortunately with SSC this is rare).

If you really don’t want to spend anything I have a free affiliate link cloaker available for direct download here. Not as cool as SSC but it will do the job reasonably well and you are free to give it away to others as well.

PLEASE READ MY LATEST POSTS ON LINK CLOAKING FOR UP TO DATE INFORMATION

1) Affiliate Links and Internet Explorer

2) Link Cloaking Updates & Covert Links

3) Cloaking Links With Samurai Stealth Cloaker