Nearly every affiliate network and most smart advertisers have geographic redirect scripts setup on their landing pages so that if someone from outside of the countries they want to receive traffic from comes to that page they are redirected elsewhere. So, if you have a CPA offer that you are only looking for leads from the United States on and someone from Canada tries to go to it you redirect them to an offer that allows Canadian traffic. This makes a lot of sense to do, but if you are an affiliate that wants to promote that offer and you live outside of it’s allowed countries it can be really annoying to try to view the landing page for that offer.

There are free browser based proxies available throughout the web, but they not very reliable. Instead, I recommend you use a premium proxy service like GeoSurf.

What is GeoSurf?

GeoSurf is an awesome proxy service that allows you to connect to their network of proxies to make it appear as if you are surfing the internet from that location. They have 110 proxy servers available to their members from all over the world and many ways you can connect to those GeoSurf servers (more information on that below in GeoSurf Features).

GeoSurf’s 110 proxy servers are located in many different locations including 25 in specific designated marketing areas within the United States.

For those looking specifically for proxies in the United States, here are the 25 cities they have proxy servers located in:

• Atlanta (GA)
• Austin (TX)
• Boston (MA)
• Charlotte (NC)
• Chicago (IL)
• Columbus (OH)
• Dallas (TX)
• Denver (CO)
• Houston (TX)
• Kansas City (MO)
• Las Vegas (NV)
• Los Angeles (CA)
• Mclean (VA)
• Miami (FL)
• Minneapolis (MN)
• New Orleans (LA)
• New York (NY)
• Philadelphia (PA)
• Phoenix (AZ)
• Portland (OR)
• Raleigh (NC)
• Sacramento (CA)
• San Diego (CA)
• San Francisco (CA)
• Seattle (WA)
• St Louis (MO)
• Tampa (FL)
• Washington DC

As you can see, they have a lot of great locations that are definitely needed. For international affiliates looking to view landing pages for offers that only allow traffic from the US, there are 25 different locations you can try. There are also international proxy servers for all the top countries there are offers on PeerFly for.

So, what tools and features are available to allow you to surf the GeoSurf proxies?

GeoSurf Features

GeoSurf Toolbar
The GeoSurf Toolbar is probably my favorite tool out of their nice collection. It allows you to easily surf using any of their proxy server locations directly from your browser. All you have to do is install the toolbar for whichever browser you prefer. They have one available for all the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer).

GeoSurf Plus
GeoSurf Plus is a pretty cool features that allows you to view display campaigns that are being run on sites, which advertisers are running where, and which ad networks are being used in the campaigns. You can find more information on GeoSurf Plus here.

GeoSurf VPN
With the GeoSurf VPN you can change your entire computers IP to one of the proxy servers available from the various GeoSurf locations. This allows you to use applications on your computer from a different IP whereas the GeoSurf toolbar is simply for viewing sites within your browser.

GeoSurf for Android and iPhone
The GeoSurf for Android phones, iPhones, and iPads is really cool. It allows you to use the GeoSurf proxy network from 98 locations directly on your phone. If you’re running mobile campaigns this is a great way to truly see and get the local perspective for your campaign.

GeoSurf Mobile Emulator
The Mobile Emulator is a lot like the GeoSurf mobile application for iPhone and Android except it emulates those devices directly in your web browser rather than a native application.

GeoSurf Direct Connect API
If you are a developer you may want to check out the GeoSurf Direct Connect API that allows you to connect to the gateways within the GeoSurf proxy network through an API.

For most affiliates the GeoSurf Premium Proxy Toolbar is a must. If you do a lot of mobile marketing you should definitely check out the native applications (iPhone or Android) and the Mobile Emulator. GeoSurf Plus is nice, but I’d recommend getting in touch with the support at GeoSurf and getting the free report they offer before you dive into that.

The support at GeoSurf is fantastic so if you have any questions do not hesitate to contact them. If you are frustrated with viewing landing pages and media from outside of your country you need to check out GeoSurf and considering buying their proxy service.

Let’s make some money!

The post Surfing Affiliate Offers with GeoSurf appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.

So, I am going to explain the entire installation process from download to setup. This should answer many of the common questions that come up while installing Prosper202, but if you get to the end and you still are unsure do not hesitate to ask in the comments below.

First off, we need to actually download Prosper202 to your computer.

Download Prosper202

To be able to upload Prosper202 to your web server you are first going to need to download it to your computer. You can download Prosper202 for free from the official Tracking202 page here.

Make sure you download Prosper202 somewhere on your computer where you will be able to easily find it. I usually just download it directly to my desktop.

Create Subdomain or Setup Your Domain

Once you have Prosper202 downloaded you will need to setup the directory on your server where you will install it. There are two options I use:

• Install directly in the public_html folder of the domain.
• Create a subdomain and install on the subdomain directory.

If you are going to use your domain just for tracking your campaigns with Prosper202 then I recommend installing it directly in the public_html directory for that domain. If you are going to use that domain for other things then you may want to setup a subdomain to host Prosper202. I have had several people tell me they could not install Prosper202 on a subdomain, but I have done it a bunch of times and never had any issues.

Now that you know where you’re going to install Prosper202 you need to setup your database.

Create a Database for Prosper202

Prosper202 is powered by a MySQL database so you will need to create one on your server. If you have cPanel then creating a database is a  really simple three step process. If you do not have cPanel installed on your server you will need to search how to create a database. With cPanel simply:

1. Create a database
2. Create a user
3. Grant user permissions on database

Create Database

Create a user

Once you create your database and MySQL user you will need to grant permissions to that user.

Now that you have granted permissions (privileges) to your MySQL database user and created your database, your Prosper202 database setup is complete. It’s time to upload Prosper202 to your server.

Upload Prosper202 to Your Server

If you have a FTP client that you already use then uploading Prosper202 to your server should be pretty simple. If you do not have a FTP client I recommend you download FileZilla. FileZilla is free and really easy to use. Upload the Prosper202 files to the directory for either your domain or the subdomain you created previously.

Install Prosper202

Once you have uploaded all the Prosper202 files you are ready to finish up your installation. Go to your domain or subdomain you installed Propser202 on and you should be promoted with a window that looks like this:

Click to create a 202-config.php file so you can create your Prosper202 configuration file. Click let’s go and you will be prompted with the following form:

You will need to complete the form with the information for the database you created earlier. The only things you should need to change are Database Name, User Name, and Password. Once you have entered your information push Submit. If you made a mistake on the form you will get an error message saying a database connection cannot be made. Otherwise, you will get this message:

All right sparky! You’ve made it through this part of the installation. Prosper202 can now communicate with your database. If you are ready, time now to run the install!

Click run the install and you will be taken to this form:

Creating your account is the last step in the Prosper202 installation process. Once you click Install Prosper202 you are all set. You can login to your Prosper202 account and you are all done!

Installing Prosper202 is not that hard and if you have everything in place you should be able to do it pretty easily. Once you have installed Propser202 make sure you check out my guide on how to setup your affiliate campaign using Prosper202.

With the right tools you will make your job as an affiliate marketer a lot easier. Prosper202 is a great start and should definitely help you analyze your traffic. Please let me know if you have any questions. Let’s make some money!

The post How to Install Prosper202 appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.

About a year and a half ago I made a site called PeerFlyBanners.com. The site provided a script that allowed you to easily rotate the banners available on our offers at PeerFly. Although it works pretty well, has been used by over 1,000 PeerFly publishers, and has generated nearly 20,000,000 banner impressions, a better option has finally been created.

I am happy to announce that we have officially launched our own in-house rotator finally at PeerFly. It is much better than my script and here are a few reasons why.

The New Banner Rotator Features

The new PeerFly banner rotator, named Ads By PeerFly, is much more complex than the simple banner rotator I previously provided my publishers. Not only is it more stable because it is being hosted on our amazing servers at PeerFly, but it will also be updated more frequently because we have our in-house programming team working on it. Over time I expect this new tool to be more than you can even picture at the moment and I have no doubt it will help my publishers make a lot more money.

On-Page Rotation

The banner rotator is setup to automatically rotate banners while your users are on the page. After a banner has been displayed for 15 seconds it automatically rotates to the next best banner based on our automated optimization. This should help increase your CTR and that should help you make more money!

Keyword Search

You can now filter banners by keyword term. So, if you want to rotate the iPhone offers from PeerFly simply enter the keyword iPhone and the rotator will specifically look for iPhone offers to display. You can also break this down by vertical or verticals (iPhone email submits).

Country Specific Offers

One of the features missing most from PeerFlyBanners.com was the ability to only display banners for offers that allow traffic from the visitor’s country. This was the first thing we added to the new banner rotator. You do not have to worry about your visitors being redirected because they are clicking on banners for offers that do not allow traffic from their country anymore! This will help increase your conversion rate and revenue.

Display or Hide Adult Banners

Another feature not previously supported by PeerFlyBanners was the ability to hide or display adult banners. You can now choose to display all banners, never display adult banners, or only display adult banners.

WordPress Plugin

I have also created a WordPress Plugin you can download and install on your WordPress blog to easily add the banner rotator script without having to touch any code. Once you download and install the plugin on your blog you will see a new PeerFly Banners Rotator widget on your Widgets page. You can drag and drop that into any sidebar on your blog and create your rotator using a simple form (shown to the right).

You can add this widget as many times as you want to as many sidebars as you want. I recommend a maximum of 5, but feel free to test out various locations to see what works best for you.

I am hoping to get this plugin added to the WordPress Plugin Directory soon and once it is you will be able to update it directly from your WordPress admin area.

Click the button above to download the latest version of the plugin from my Dropbox.

I’m really excited to see how beneficial our new banner rotator is going to be for our publishers at PeerFly. We are already serving millions of impressions a day and I expect that as we continue to see this tool grow and we’re able to optimize it and add new features everyone is going to enjoy the amazing results it has to offer.

If you have any questions about the new banner rotator or the WordPress plugin that goes with it please let me know. I’d also appreciate some feedback so don’t forget to comment once you get it all set up on your site. Let’s make some money!

The post PeerFly Banner Rotator appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.

New Blog Design

Last year I decided that it was time to get a custom design done for this blog. I had been using a theme I purchased on ThemeForest and had modified it quite a bit. I knew a custom design was really necessary to take this blog to the next level so I got in touch with the guy that had made our new PeerFly design. After a few stressful weeks and about $1,000 I finally had the awesome new blog design you see today.

Amazing Blog Growth

As I predicted in last year’s birthday post, LPF has continued to see amazing growth over the past year and traffic has more than doubled. Although I published 27 less posts than the year before, my pageviews over the past year have tripled, the amount of comments posted has doubled, and Alexa shows this blog as one of the top 20,000 visited in the world. My Alexa rank is now better than one the blogs I admire most, ZacJohnson.com (who recently interviewed me).

Blog Stats since April 2012

• 60 posts
• 1,602 comments (92,000 spam)
• 1,500,000 pageviews
• 2,137 Likes (http://www.facebook.com/LukePeerFly)
• Thousands of Affiliate Manager Exclusive subscribers

My top 10 posts list from last year included some of the posts below, but even the top post had less than 10,000 views. Now, my most read article, Setting up a 7Search Campaign, has had over 40,000 views and should hit 50,000 in the next month or so. I am hoping by next year my top post will have been viewed over 100,000 times!

Top 10 Posts

1. Setting up a 7Search Campaign - 42,784 views
2. How to iframe an affiliate offer - 40,927 views
3. Direct Linking PeerFly Offers on Facebook - 35,538 views
4. Rotate PeerFly offers using PeerFlyBanners.com - 28,712 views
5. LeadImpact PPV Review - 28,508 views
6. Top PPV Networks - 27,104 views
7. Motivation – $350,000 in a Week - 26,486 views
8. PeerFly Application Denied? What now? - 25,920 views
9. Blacklisting Bad Performing SubIDs on 7Search - 24,008 views
10. POF Case Study: SeniorPeopleMeet.com - 23,495 views

POF Case Studies

For a few months my primary focus was setting up campaigns on Plenty of Fish (POF). Although I had previously published my 4 tips for a successful POF campaign, I had not been actively running any campaigns so I deposited some money on POF Ads and went to work. I published 3 different POF Case Studies that have been read over 40,000 times.

• POF Case Study: SeniorPeopleMeet.com
• POF Case Study: Jewcier
• POF Case Study: PinkWink

Product Reviews

I also tried out and reviewed quite a few different products and tools over the past year. Some of the reviews were paid, but I only accepted paid reviews for products that I knew would be useful to my publishers and any affiliate marketer in the space.

Something I did not expect when I started writing these reviews is that I would rank so well in Google for the various product and tool names. It has definitely been a pleasant surprise and has helped generate thousands of pageviews for these product owners.

• The Dojo
• AdultAdSpy
• HostGator
• SocialAdNinja

New Projects Launched

I can never seem to stop working on new projects. Over the past year I have added 4 new projects to my list:

• LI2PF - LeadImpact to PeerFly Keyword Tracking with LI2PF.com
• Free iFrame Hosting Tool
• affposts - Affiliate Marketing Blogs Galore!
• Incent.ly Offers - Search Incent.ly Offers on IncentlyOffers.com (what is Incent.ly?)

I have also made a lot of updates to PeerFlyOffers.com, which has had over 300,000 searches since last April.

LPF’s second year has been awesome and it has really changed my outlook and goals for this blog. I get compliments every single trade show I attend from people I have never met about how much they like my blog and how helpful it has been. It is my goal to keep building on that over the next year. I’m hopeful that I will start setting aside more time to write articles so I can publish them more frequently. I’m also hopeful that my newsletter will reach 10,000 subscribers and my Alexa rank will drop below 10,000.

I appreciate everything this industry has given me and I’m thankful for being able to give back through this blog and my various projects. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any subjects you’d like me to cover or any questions you think I can answer for you. Together, we can both continue to grow. Let’s make some money!

The post LPF is Two Years Old! appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.

When you create an ad specifically for a fan page on Facebook you are given a few different options on what you would like to promote with that ad. You can get more page likes, promote page posts, or use advanced options to create your campaign.

Get More Page Likes

The Get More Page Likes option simply allows you to create a Facebook ad specifically for your fan page. This add will include the Like button below it to encourage people who view the ad to Like your page.

Promote Page Posts

The Promote Page Posts option is similar to the Get More Page Likes option, but instead of you creating the advertisement that is being displayed it will show an advertisement with a recent post you have made on your fan page. This optional also includes a Like This Page link below the post content to help encourage users seeing the ad to Like your page as well.

Sponsored Stories

Both of these ad types and the Advanced Options allow you to also create Sponsored Stories to help increase your reach. Sponsored Stories allow you to create ads that “Help people discover your business through their friends. No increase in budget is required.” Basically, it will create stories on your fan’s friends new feeds about:

• People liking your Page post
• People commenting on your Page post
• People sharing your Page post

The cool thing about Sponsored Stories is that the CTR and engagement is usually really high and it can drive a ton of targeted traffic to your posts without raising the price of your traffic. You may not get as many new Likes to your fan page, but you will get a lot of Comments, Shares, and Post Likes (likes specifically on the post, not the page).

So, now that you know about the different ad types and you have created your ad, what is the best bidding strategy?

Fan Page Ad Bidding

There are three different options you can choose from when deciding how you want to bid for traffic when setting up your Facebook Ads campaign for a fan page. The three options are:

• Optimized CPM
• CPC
• CPM

The CPM and CPC are basic bidding models. You can bid a CPC (cost per click) or a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). Facebook gives you suggested CPCs and CPMs if you choose these options, but you can bid whatever you want.

The Optimized CPM is the option that I use most and recommend. You do not get to choose what you bid with this option, but Facebook will automatically bid the best price for you to get the most engagement possible. You do not have any control over the price, but over time is it usually the best option.

With most Facebook ad campaigns you setup you should notice that over time if your CTR is good your CPM or CPC will drop. Well, the same is true for the Optimized CPM campaigns. I have noticed that it usually takes a little longer, but I have several campaigns that have been running for months and I’m only paying $0.03-0.05 CPM. Here is an example campaign I set up last week and the fluctuation on the CPM as time went on:

With those 5 days worth of data you can see that my CPM started out really high. I knew that was going to happen, but I still made the mistake of leaving my daily budget at $10. I usually will start all my campaigns out at a $3 daily budget because this will be enough to give me some data on whether or not this campaign is going to be worthwhile. I like to run the campaigns over the course of a week or so to let the Optimized CPM drop and with a $3 daily budget you’re only going to spend $21 maximum. Well, with this campaign I started to see promising results so I went ahead and increased my budget on the 5th day. I will keep this one running as long as it’s producing new fans and engagement. I estimate that over the next week my Optimized CPM will drop to around $0.20 and then hopefully even more than that in the coming weeks.

Now, if you have been paying attention you may be wondering why I don’t just setup the exact same campaign and bid a CPM lower than what my Optimized CPM is. If all the Optimized CPM is doing is letting Facebook figure out where my best CPM is then why can’t I just setup this exact same campaign with a set CPM of $0.56? I have already seen my Optimized CPM drop to that rate so if I manually bid that I should see traffic right? Well, I decided to do just that so we could take a look.

Optimized CPM vs Manual CPM Bidding

I created the same ad from the table above using standard set CPM bidding. I set the max CPM at $0.77 and let it run for a day. On the second day (which is also day 2 from the table above), I saw the following results for the same exact ad for the two different bidding types:

After just 1 day my manual CPM dropped from the maximum CPM I was bidding, $0.77, to just $0.05. My CTR was not great ($0.054%), but I did get 30 clicks for $3.00 and 9 Page Likes.

On the other hand, the Optimized CPM bidding campaign got 859 clicks (including Photo Views, Post Shares, Post Comments, etc) with a 24% CTR after just $3 spent. I also got 40 new Page Likes from this campaign.

It’s easy to see from these campaigns that Facebook favors the Optimized CPM bidding campaigns. I only got a 10th of the exposure (reach), but the people I did reach were much more engaged. Although my CPM is quite a bit more, it’s already dropping and will continue to drop. I may not reach the $0.05 CPM, but the increased engagement will more than make up for the higher CPM.

I recommend the next time you are creating a Facebook Ads campaign for your fan page that you split test this yourself. I think you will find similar results. I am going to stick to the Optimized CPM bidding because I have seen the amazing results it can give.

Fan pages on Facebook can be powerful tools to reach a very large targeted audience. Knowing how to build, maintain, and advertise pages can lead to a very profitable and long term business. I have several large pages (including the one from the screenshot on the left) that I am doing all those things on and the results have been very promising. Over the next month I plan to post more about fan pages and will be releasing my own product to show you exactly what I am doing. If you’re interested in being first in line to give it a try join my mailing list. Until then, let’s make some money!

The post Facebook Fan Page Ads: Optimized Bidding or Manual? appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.

Twitter Cards are relatively new to Twitter. Basically, you add a piece of code to your website or blog and then Twitter will use that piece of code to generate a preview (Card) with details about your link and display those details on your tweet on Twitter. Sound complicated? It’s not really. Let’s take a look at two of my Twitter Cards.

With the Twitter Card examples above, my blog is linked in the tweet on left and an offer on PeerFlyOffers.com is linked to on the right. First, let’s take a look at the one for my blog.

WordPress Twitter Card

Creating a Twitter Card for your WordPress blog is really easy. Most SEO plugins have the functionality built in. I use SEO Ultimate on this blog and it has the Twitter Card functionality feature built into the new post page.

The more popular WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin makes setting up the Twitter Card a little more complicated. You have to enable it under the Social section of their SEO menu.

Once enabled, either WordPress plugin will create the META tags required in order to create the Twitter Card. To see if you have it properly installed, setup, and enabled, you can use the preview Twitter Card tool.

Twitter Card META Tags

The Twitter Card META tags are pretty easy to understand and add to your site. I’ve added them to PeerFlyOffers.com offer pages which where the information in the tweet on the right in the screenshot above is coming from. Basically, you just create meta tags for:

• URL
• Title
• Description
• Image

There are a few other tags you can add as well. Here are the meta tags I’m using:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:url" content="http://www.peerflyoffers.com/offer.php?id=7351" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Tara Astrology - US" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Payout: $1.30 - CR: 28.91% - EPC: $0.38 - Get your free reading! Target demo is women 25+. Converts on first page." />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/http%3A%2F%2Fpeerfly.com%2Fpreview.php%3Foffer%3D7351?w=400&height=400" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@peerflyoffers" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@LukePeerFly" />

You would want to change the “content” to whatever content you want to show in your Twitter Card. Place those tags in the head of your HTML page and then preview your new Twitter Card to make sure it’s setup properly.

Submit Your Twitter Card

Once your Twitter Card is setup properly you will need to submit it to Twitter and get it approved before it will start showing up on tweets with your site links. It’s taken up to two weeks before my Twitter Card was reviewed and approved. Once submitted and reviewed you will get an email from Twitter letting you know whether your Card has been approved or not.

It is important to stay ahead of the curve and I think as Twitter continues to evolve they’ll be integrating Twitter Card information more and more. So, if you have yours setup and ready to go when those changes go into effect you will be ahead of the competition. I decided to setup mine for the same reason I made sure to get my picture added to Google’s results, it’s good for branding and should help provide extra exposure. So, create your Twitter Card today and stay ahead of the competition. Let me know if you have any questions. Let’s make some money!

The post Create a Twitter Card appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.

Search Incent.ly Offers

The cool thing about PeerFlyOffers.com and IncentlyOffers.com is they have the exact same structure just like PeerFly and Incent.ly and they work the same, but obviously with different offers. With IncentlyOffers.com you can search through the 500+ incentive affiliate offers that are available at incent.ly. The search bar at the top of the page will search each offer’s:

• Name
• Description
• Offer ID
• Country
• Vertical
• Banner Sizes

It has a nice autocomplete (search as you type) feature as well.

Incent.ly Offer Lists

You can also use Incently Offers to view various offer lists. These include:

• Top Converting Offers
• New Offers
• Top EPCs
• Down Offers
• International Offers
• Worldwide Offers

and the top offers for each marketing method allowed:

• Cash Incent
• Point Incent
• Virtual Currency
• Content Locking

There are also lists for each offer vertical available on incent.ly. You can use these lists and offer search to find the best available offers to run for your specific incentive traffic.

Incent.ly Offers

Each offer found when searching Incent.ly Offers has it’s own offer page as well. On that offer page you can find all the details available for that offer. This includes offer description, vertical, allowed marketing, restricted marketing, banners, similar offers, and conversation rate history. IncentlyOffers.com is the only place you can find each offers conversion rate history!

So, what do you think? I am planning to keep improving on PeerFlyOffers and IncentlyOffers. It should be easy to apply any new features or updates to both sites. If there’s anything you would like to see added or updated please let me know.

Let’s make some money!

The post Search Incent.ly Offers on IncentlyOffers.com appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.

Just like with affiliate marketing, when you are generating traffic to your website there should be some sort of conversion you are hoping to generate. If you are just sending users to your site without any sort of goal in mind, you are wasting your time. For example, with this blog my ultimate goal is to get you (my reader) on my mailing list. I know that for each user on my mailing list I will generate X amount of dollars each year. I also know that having you on my mailing list means you will be a return user to my blog, generating more traffic which means more money. So, let’s take a look at how exactly you can create Goals within Google Analytics to track conversions.

Creating Goals within Analytics

In order to create Goals and track conversions with Google Analytics you will need to have it installed on your website. I am not going to explain how this is done if you haven’t already, but with a few Google searches you should have no problem getting it setup.

Finding the page that allows you to create a Goal within Analytics is not as easy as it should be. Here are step-by-step instructions on how you can find and create Goals.

Login in Google Analytics, select the site you want to create the Goal for, and then click Admin at the top right of the page:

You should be at the Profiles page for that site:

Click the site name (www.lukepeerfly.com in the example above) and it’ll take you to the Assets page. Once there, click Goals:

You can create 4 different Goal Sets. Click + Goal under the first Goal Set. You can name your goal and choose what type of Goal to create. Setting up a goal within this form is really easy. For example, if I wanted to track my new newsletter subscribers, I would just enter:

Once you save your goal Google Analytics will now track every visitor that hits that page and tag them with your goal (conversion). Then, within Google Analytics, you can see how many people are converting for you. I use this to see how many of my retargeting visitors and visitors from my fan page Sponsored Stories campaign are actually turning into subscribers of my Affiliate Manager Exclusive newsletter. This is pretty easy to do with Custom Campaigns on Analytics.

Being able to track conversions is important with any type of marketing. Although Google Analytics does not make it really easy to find where to setup your site for conversion tracking using Goals, once you do get it setup it’s easy to track where your traffic is coming from and how well it’s performing for you. For example, I know that one of my best converting traffic sources for this blog is users coming from PeerFlyOffers.com. They are much more likely to opt-in than my average reader.

I hope I have opened your eyes to conversion/goal tracking with Google Analytics. If you have any questions please feel free to comment below or email me.

The post Tracking Conversions with Google Analytics appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.

Before I continue, I should disclose that I am a Super Moderator and contributor at both CPAFix and The Dojo. Obviously I am somewhat biased towards them because of this, but I also have spent about a year and a half helping the community without any sort of compensation and I would not have done that if I didn’t think CPAFix was awesome.

A little bit about CPAFix

CPAFix is a free affiliate marketing forum run by my buddy, Oliver Kenyon. The community of affiliate marketers there has grown to over 8,000 people! There’s a ton of a great information being shared there in pretty much every aspect of affiliate marketing.

If you are interested in learning more about CPAFix I recommend you head on over to the forum or check out my previous articles about it:

• CPA Discussion on Affiliate Forum CPAFix.com
  
• Interview with Oliver Kenyon from CPAFix.com

The latest addition to CPAFix, The Dojo, is an exclusive paid section of the site that is an affiliate marketing newbie’s dream.

A Tour of The Dojo

The Dojo is probably the most organized affiliate marketing forum available and the fact that it is just an exclusive section of CPAFix makes it incredibly convenient. I am on CPAFix throughout the day anyway and instead of having to login to a completely different forum (I check AffPlaybook about once a week because I forget all about it) the new posts on The Dojo will show up right on CPAFix when you’re roaming around.

The other really nice thing about membership to The Dojo is that it is only a one time fee of $97. Most paid affiliate marketing forums charge you monthly, but with The Dojo you pay once and then you have exclusive access for life. So, when an awesome new method is exposed two months from now and everyone is talking about it you won’t have to pay again to learn it!

The topics covered on The Dojo range quite a bit within the affiliate marketing space, but as I mentioned before, it’s nicely organized so you can easily find what you are looking for. For example, I have been doing a lot of work with Sponsored Stories and recently saw a post on The Dojo titled How to grow your Facebook Fanpages. After reading through it I got an idea for a way to implement one of the methods mentioned on my own fan page and saw a HUGE increase in interaction:

The post that caused that response also did very well within my Sponsored Stories campaigns:

That’s just one example of how I have used information from The Dojo. There’s some fan page discussion, but as I said, overall there is a lot covered and it’s very newbie friendly. Here are some of the articles recently posted:

You can build a very good foundation and expand on your knowledge/skills with the information provided at The Dojo. I highly recommend you take a look. The $97 price tag should not be your determining factor when deciding whether you want to join The Dojo. Do you want to find new ways to make money with affiliate marketing and are you willing to put forth a good effort to do so? If yes, then The Dojo is for you.

Let’s make some money!

The post The Dojo Review appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.

I think I should preface this by saying I am not a super affiliate or anywhere close to it. I do affiliate marketing casually on the side. I have a full time job and a family that take priority over it. So, what I do is a little different than what other people might tell you to do.

There are two elements I consider to be vital if you are going to be even remotely successful when promoting anything online: Tracking and Testing.

For tracking, I strongly suggest you install Prosper202 somewhere and get very familiar with it. It is a free tracking platform that was built for affiliate marketers and it works extremely well in helping you track the results of everything you do.

For testing, you need to constantly test new ideas, new landing pages, new ad copy, and so on. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that you might find that making a small change to your landing pages will result in a huge jump in conversions (and thus more money to you).

That being said, let me show you what you can do with 7Search, Prosper202, and PeerFly. I will be referring to Prosper202 as P202 for the rest of this posting.

Tracking With Prosper202

First off, you need to make sure that P202 is receiving data from PeerFly. This is called a Postback (they send some information to P202 when you get a conversion). What you need to do is get the Postback URL from P202 via the Setup tab, and modify it slightly so you are using PeerFly’s code for the commission amount and the subid1 variable.

To get the postback URL from P202, click on the Setup tab, then on Get Postback/Pixel. It gives you a few options, but use the Simple Global Post Back URL option, here is what it looks like:

Then you simply login to PeerFly and put the code into the Global Postback page so it looks something like this:

Now whenever you send a click through P202 to any offer in PeerFly and it converts, PeerFly will automatically send some data to you. When combined with the data that you have in P202 from when you sent the visitor through, you can get some very impressive stats.

I am not going to cover how to use P202 in this posting, Luke wanted me to show some of the results I am getting and how I analyze the data, so we are going to move onto how to analyze the results in P202 as that is what I do a lot.

The other key item here to make sure this works properly is to make sure you are passing your P202 subid to PeerFly with every offer into the s1 variable. Otherwise, if you get a conversion, PeerFly will send back the data they have to you but it will not match up because you are not specifying a subid.

A subid in P202 is basically a unique identifier for every individual visitor that you send through. It is critical that you have this mapped properly to the s1 variable unless you want to get a bit more advanced which is not really necessary.

When you add a specific offer from PeerFly into P202 you do it as a Campaign. You enter some basic information and your link that Peerfly gives you, but you have to modify it slightly to pass in the subid variable as the s1 variable to PeerFly. Once you do that, it will map correctly and PeerFly can correctly postback to you.

Here is an example of what it looks like when you set it up:

Example of Using 7Search, Prosper202, and PeerFly

That’s enough of the basics for now. I want to show you a campaign I had running to promote some offers and I will show you data from 7Search, P202, and PeerFly so you can see how it all works together once you have it setup and running properly.

This campaign ran from Tuesday January 29, 2013 until Monday February 4, 2013 (7 days total).

Here are the stats from 7Search for that period for the campaign:

Because 7Search is a pay-per-click network (which is what I focus on, I do not get involved with CPM advertising as a general rule) the two numbers I care about the most are Clicks and Cost. You can see that 7Search sent me 3,367 clicks for a total of $33.67.

Now let’s take a look at the results for that time period. This is from P202 for this specific campaign:

The [No Campaign] line is because I was using landing pages for my test. So, what this report is showing you that I got 3118 clicks tracked, of those 272 clicked through my landing page and 9 converted on Just Hook Up. A further 149 clicked through and went to xxxBlackBook but did not convert.

Now some of the numbers in P202 do not necessarily agree with what 7Search is stating. This is due to numerous reasons, mostly technical stuff about duplicated clicks and such. It is not a big deal in this case, but if you ever see a huge discrepancy in what your ad network is claiming and what you are seeing then you need to call them up and figure out what is going on.

So in short I spent $33.67 at 7Search, but earned $42.75.

Since I had a successful campaign running, the next trick is to optimize it to make it more profitable and there are several ways to do it. Next I am going to show how to do a few basic optimization tactics using all that click data from P202.

Landing Page Optimization

The first thing I look over when trying to optimize a campaign is my landing pages. At the time of this campaign, I had 5 different landing pages running. Here are the stats during this time period:

Now just using that information, you can see that only three of my landing pages managed to generate any conversions during the test period.

#2 and #5 did not generate a single conversion, but #4 did with the same amount of traffic being directed to it. That tells me that either #4 was significantly better or #2 and #5 were significantly worse. Either way, #2 and #5 could be removed from the rotation at this point (which I did when I initially reviewed the data).

Furthermore, you can see that while #1 got the most leads, it also had way more people sent to it (because it was the first lander I built and it ran solo for a while). But if you look at the click-through rate and the signup rate, you can see that it significantly under-performs when compared to #4 and #3. So at this point I took #1 out of the rotation, leaving just #3 and #4 running.

That leaves #3 and #4 being the only landing pages left running at this point because they showed the best results. I then took those landing pages and started testing variations of them and I’m happy to say after this initial campaign I got them up to 25-30% click-through rates on both.

Day-Parting Optimization

The next step that I do when optimizing campaigns is to look at the day parting report in P202 for the campaign. It is found in the Overview tab and here is the data for this campaign:

This report shows you the hours of the day that you got the clicks and what the performance was. It does not take a genius to see that all my conversions happened in the afternoon and evenings (which makes sense as I was promoting dating offers).

Something you may not know is that 7Search has a Campaign Scheduler feature which lets you set the hours of the day that you campaigns will run. You have to call them up and ask them to activate it, but once you get it turned on it can be very useful when you combine it with P202. Here is what it looks like after I did a lot of testing with this campaign (Green means the campaign is running during that time):

The key advantage here is that 7Search will by default try to spread your clicks out throughout the day. But when you set specific hours it can run, you get way more clicks during those specific times which leads to more conversions.

Now, I think I should point out that P202 has another useful report called Week Parting which shows the same information but it is for the days of the week instead of hours of the day. I did not use the report much during this initial campaign, but it is something I strongly recommend doing as a further step.

Referral-Based Optimization

The last optimization tactic I am going to cover today is referral-based optimization. Basically looking at where all these clicks are coming from and blacklisting the bad ones.

You can use the Group Breakdown report in P202 (assuming you are passing along the AFFID and RID variables from 7Search) to identify the specific members of 7Search who are sending you traffic. Here is an example:

 What you want to look for is somebody who sent a lot of clicks but none of them converted, here is an example:

I found a few affiliates in their network like this that I blocked by blacklisting on 7Search. Only block affiliates that send you a good number of clicks that do not convert (i.e. 100+ clicks with no conversions).

That is all I have for now. As a recap, here are some of the key areas you can quickly and easily optimize by learning P202 and using it properly:

• Landing Pages
• Hour of Day / Day of Week
• Specific Referrals Within Ad Networks

There are several other ways to look at the data, but this is an extremely long post already so I will leave it at this for now. Feel free to comment if you have any questions.

The post 7Search and Prosper202 Optimization Case Study appeared first on Affiliate Manager, Marketer, Web Developer, and Entrepreneur.