One of the toughest things about running an affiliate website can be keeping track of all of those links that you need to create to redirect to the merchants. Not to mention if one of the merchants programs goes offline at an affiliate network all of your links for that merchant can stop working just like that. Then there is the problem of forgetting to add a link to a merchant. You write a great post talking about how great this new product of service is and add a link straight to the merchant instead of using your affiliate link. The post becomes popular yet you don’t notice right away that you missed the link. All those possible sales gone.

One of the new trends in affiliate marketing is using services like VigLink or Skimlinks. Essentially these services take some of the headache away of managing your own affiliate accounts at all of the different affiliate networks and allow you as a publisher to focus on what you do best, publish great content.

Both services work pretty much the same you sign up for them and then you add a small snippet of javascript into your website. That javascript will take care of making sure the links that are to their affiliate partners are linked properly. The best part as a publisher is you do not have to worry about creating special links, links breaking or any of those headaches. If the merchant is covered by the service they will automatically add in the affiliate link.

While both services are similar in how they work there are some subtle differences in them. Skimlinks makes you add your website and have that website approved before you can add the Skimlinks code to your website. VigLink does not authorize websites individually so once you are approved you can pretty much add the code to any site you own. Also VigLink is also partnered with Cloudflare so you can actually install VigLink on any of your Cloudflare enabled websites and Cloudflare will take care of inserting the javascript for you.

Both services are free to join but there is a cost to having them manage all of the links and affiliate merchants for you. They both take a 25% cut of all sales you make. That might sound like a lot but if you have a site with hundreds or thousands of merchant links it can easily be worth your time to have those links managed but VigLink or Skimlinks. The services can also get some better rates so it is possible that even though you lose 25% on each commission you might actually make roughly the same since the commission is higher to begin with.

If you have been looking for a way to monetize your website but don’t want to go through all the hassle of creating managing all of the affiliate accounts you would need or simply want to monitize all of the possible links you can with as little headache as possible take a look at either VigLink or Skimlinks. They might be exactly what you are looking for. I know I have been converted a couple of my own affilaite websites over to VigLink and have been pleased with the results and the fact that I no longer have to worry about links breaking or other problems. The links just work and if they can be linked through an affiliate program VigLink takes care of it.

All that being said I am not using either service here on LGR Internet Solutions yet so I manually had to add the links.

You might be wondering what has been keeping me so busy that I have not been around to post much here at the LGR Internet Solutions blog. Well let me show you, the Do Bugs Need Drugs English and French websites recently were redesigned from top to bottom and after many months of work have been launched.

Perhaps some history on the website would be helpful. The site was previously all hand coded in HTML and roughly three years ago under went a slight upgrade to remove the table based design. Over the years the site had grown to the point that the current design and overall structure needed to be looked at. After a meeting and several phone calls a new site structure was ironed out and a design slowly came into existence. The original website was an orange colour so the move to a new purple color was a dramatic shift in look for the website.

Since the website was being redone it was decided it would be a good idea to move the site into WordPress to allow them to be able to edit and create their own pages on the website. Previously if there were any changes to the site they needed to call me to fix even the smallest typos. Now with the site being in WordPress they can simply login and edit the content as they need. This is true of both the English and the French versions of the website.

Aside from the website now being powered by WordPress the design was created using the Headway Theme framework. This made it easy to create the custom look for each individual section as well as add in our own custom CSS. The French version of the website actually pulls in the CSS from the English site and then with only minor CSS edits to accommodate some longer French phrases was created fairly quickly. This helps to maintain a consistent look and feel between the English and French websites while making it easy to adjust the design and layout.

Along with WordPress the websites also take advantage of a content delivery network from MaxCDN to help improve the load time. Javascript, CSS, images and most importantly the videos are distributed using the CDN. This has made a dramatic decrease in the load time of the website.

I have had the pleasure of working with Do Bugs Need Drugs off and on for close to 10 years and was pleased to help them with this current version of their website. I hope you will find it useful and the information is very informative. Many thanks to the team at Do Bugs Need Drugs and I look forward to working with you all in the future.

From January 8th to 10th I attended Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. I wanted to give you an overview of some of my favourite sessions and other activities while I was down there. Below are some of the sessions that stood out for me.

How to Quadruple Revenue Using Existing Traffic

I attended this session for a couple reasons. First was the fact that Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners (Twitter @tim_ash) was a part of it. I read his book Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions and I wanted to hear him speak. The second reason was I have seen a trend on some of my affiliate websites over the last year of lower conversion rates and some ideas on how to improve things is always good. Always looking for ideas on how to improve things. It was a good session and I was able to come away with some actionable items to implement on some of my sites (including this one at some point).

Affiliate Marketing in the Age of Social Media

I will admit I have never heard of Dave Taylor before. Perhaps it is because I live in Canada or I just live in my own little world most of the time, but he did remind me of a lot of things that I agree with regarding the social web.

It was also interesting that this session took place on the same day that Google announced that Google+ would be integrated into search results. The idea that shopping and referring people to products and services is a social activity not an algorithm. People are social creatures and we look for advice on our purchasing decisions from other people. This was one of the reasons I knew when Google announced Google+ that it would be important to be on there, but that is a whole other post.

The long term goal of an affiliate is not necessarily to just get the sale but to help people make a decision by interacting with them on a social level. While I agree with this ideal, it is not always easy. Some merchants do not allow social media marketing, though most will allow you to link to your own website review.

There was a bit of discussion regarding Pinterest, and how it allows affiliate links. How long that will last will be up for debate, but for now it has potential to be a social / affiliate channel.

In the end I was reminded of a quote from Stephen King.

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”
- Stephen King

In affiliate marketing I think there is a similar idea. I will create affiliate websites that will help people and add value, but if that does not work and I can’t make a sale I will go for the quick and easy datafeed website that will rank well and get the click. Ok it might not transfer over so well but hopefully you get the point. Social media affiliate marketing is hard and it is amazing how easy and well a datafeed affiliate website can do to just get the click sometimes.

Driving Inbound Calls from Mobile Search

One of my goals for attending Affiliate Summit was to look for new ways to promote affiliate products and services. Watching the growth of mobile over the last little while made me want to go to this session for ideas on how to use it to increase the sales. It was an interesting session and I learned a lot about where to start in the mobile search and driving calls. While it was interesting I also realized that the majority of the merchants I work with do not allow any kind of search marketing and I would have to look at some new merchants to expand in this direction.

This session did get me thinking more about the merchants I do work with that offer mobile apps. Many merchants offer mobile apps and want affiliates to promote the fact that they have mobile apps but many of those merchants mobile apps are actually an affiliate leak for me to promote. People could end up installing, creating an account and using the mobile app from the merchant being referred by me but there is no way to track it to me leaving no way for me to get credit for a sale. There needs to be a way to track affiliate generated mobile app installs.

Lots of ideas and thoughts generated from this session, even if they were not necessarily the intended idea of the session. I know I will be looking at more mobile friendly websites and merchants this coming year.

---

Aside from sessions I was able to meet with several merchants I work with in person for the first time. It was nice to put a face and a name together and chat about their product/service and how to better promote it. This was the most valuable time I spent at the conference and something I will be making more time for in the future.

I hurt my back before heading down to Vegas for the conference so going out every night and partying was not high on my list of things to do. Not that it would be anyways, but I did head over to the SeaWorld event with their Animal Ambassadors. While I am not a SeaWorld affiliate, this did make me want to go to visit one of their parks. The penguins stole the show and my wife and kids were extremely jealous that I got so close to them. Not to mention the stuffed animals I brought back for the kids are now their new favourites. Thanks to SeaWorld for a great show!

Overall it was a good trip to Vegas and Affiliate Summit. I will likely look at going again at some point in the future but can’t see making it an annual or regular trip. Just to difficult to make the time in the busy family/work schedule it seems.

If you were at Affiliate Summit what were your favourite sessions?

I decided a little while ago to attend Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas in January 2012. For the conference I needed some business cards and wanted to add a QR Code to the card to make it easy to contact me by scanning the code. The problem is most of the QR code generators that you find out on the Internet only generate a low resolution QR code that goes all blurry when you try to print them.

Thankfully doing a Google search for lead me to the QReate & Track QR Code Generator. They allow you to create high resolution QR codes for free if you do one at a time. If you need to do bulk QR code generation you would have to sign up and pay.

For my limited use all I needed was to create a couple of high resolution QR codes for printing on my business card. I used the web address generator since I wanted to allow people to come here to my website and visit either my contact page or a new tweet me page that allows people to send me a tweet easily. The generator allows you to create QR codes of more than just URL’s including email addresses, business card information, event information and more. You can choose the colour and then just have to download your high resolution QR code.

I just got my business cards and the codes work great. The colour is a little off from what I wanted but that is my own fault. Silly me for forgetting that RGB and CMYK print different. If I need to get more cards printed I will have to remember that.

One of the affiliate offers I participate in redirects visitors to their website to their country specific based websites which is great for the user, not so great for me because when the user is redirected the affiliate cookie is lost and I don’t get credit for the sale. Each country has their own affiliate program so it is possible to get credit for any sales that happen on those country specific sites, but the redirect has to happen before the user visits the main company website where they redirect the user.

While it is possible to create country specific landing pages for each country there is always the chance that a visitor from one of those other countries will still click on a link that would take them to the main company website. To prevent this from happening I have installed a script to check geolocation and redirect the user to the appropriate country specific website instead of them going to the main companies website and being redirected.

Eric Nagel has a PHP script you can use to do something similar, and while his method would work the thought of having to maintain the IP Geolocation database, even through a cron job, just sounds like trouble to me. Not to mention some shared web hosts don’t allow you to run cron jobs or to run a cron job that unzips a file.

The solution I came up with relies on the service Cloudflare. I wrote a post about Cloudflare earlier this year. Cloudflare has this neat little feature called Geolocation where they will add in a server variable that you can access with PHP calle $_SERVER["HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY"]. Once you turn the feature on in Cloudflare all the requests to your Cloudflare enabled website will contain the country code of the user.

All you have to do then is create a PHP redirect script that checks for the Cloudflare variable and redirect the user to the correct link.

Here is a copy of what I use to redirect users.


<?php

$country_code = $_SERVER["HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY"];

if ($country_code=="UK") {
$link = 'Insert UK Link';
}
elseif ($country_code=="FR") {
$link = 'Insert France Link';
}
elseif ($country_code=="DE") {
$link = 'Insert Germany Link';
}
else {
$link = 'Insert Default Link';
}

header("location:$link");
exit;

?>


A word of warning, for some users in the UK their country code is returned as UK and others are GB so you might want an extra check for both codes.

I was already redirecting people through this link to help manage my links, this just adds an extra level to that redirect. It has already paid off making sure that users from the countries I specified were redirected to the correct website for them. I currently have this redirect installed on a shared server with the website added to Cloudflare.

If you need to know specific country codes Wikipedia has a list that you can use.

This is a pretty simple method and Cloudflare takes care of maintaining the IP Geolocation database for you. Of course you could do more sophisticated things than this but this gets the job done for me.

While I am a fan of Monty Python’s Spam skit, I am not a fan of automated WordPress spam, and it seems to be getting worse every day. Of course the large majority of WordPress comment spam is just automated comments posting directly to the WordPress wp-comments-post.php file. I have used different methods in the past but recently came across a way to help keep the spammers away.

While there are many very good plugins available for WordPress to help keep spam down, sometimes the best method is to use your we server to block it in the first place. Thanks to a very helpful post on the V7N forum here is a way that you can block a large portion of automated comment spam using your .htaccess file.

Before you add these six lines of code to your .htaccess file on the root of your WordPress installation be sure to make a copy, just in case something goes wrong. The wp-comments-post.php file is located in the root of your WordPress install so you need to add this code to the main .htaccess file. If you have pretty permalinks turned on you probably will not need the “RewriteEngine On” line, since pretty permalinks already turns that on.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomain.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]

Anyways the code basically does this. It checks for someone posting directly to the wp-comments-post.php file, which automated spam bots do, and if the referrer is not your domain it redirects that request back to the IP address of of where the request came from.

I have been testing this out for a few days now and I am pleased to say that the amount of spam that has made it through is significantly down. It is not all gone, and there is still some making it through, but the percentage has decreased significantly. You will still need to run Akismet to catch the spam that is done by real people but this can help lower the load on your WordPress site from the automated spam bots.

If spam has your WordPress website swamped give this a try and see if it helps to turn the tide in your favour a little bit.

After you have done that take a break and enjoy the Monty Python Spam skit.

Changes are coming this week to the LGR Internet Solutions email subscribers. Previously I was using Feedburner to deliver my blog updates by email. That worked ok, but it was not perfect and I wanted to improve the deliver of those emails and offer more content on a regular basis for email subscribers. To achieve that goal I am moving all of the Feedburner email subscribers to my AWeber email mailing list later this week.

What this means for you if you are subscribed to the LGR Internet Solutions email list delivered by Feedburner. I will export your email address from Feedburner and import it into AWeber. Once that import is approved at AWeber you will need to reconfirm your email address to be subscribed to receive blog updates. Once you reconfirm you will receive blog updates similar to before along with the occasional other contest and other exclusive content that will only be made available to email subscribers.

People will also notice that I have removed the email subscription form on the website for the Feedburner email subscriptions and replaced it with a new AWeber form. There will be other small changes on the site in the next few days.

I have been thinking about this change for awhile now. I wanted to do this now before the email subscribers with Feedburner becomes to large. RSS subscribers should be unaffected. Thanks for your patience while during this change and I appreciate your trust in me to offer me your email address.

Over two years ago I signed up with Dropbox and wrote a quick little review of it. Since then I have gotten constant comments on that post of people wanting to increase their Dropbox referral space by leaving their Dropbox referral code. At one point it got so bad I just finally turned off comments on the post and the flood stopped.

It would not have been so bad if people had actually left a short review of what they liked or did not like about Dropbox, but often it was just a short blurb like:

Sign up with my code and get extra space!

Well, last week I had an idea so I took a couple hours and created Review Dropbox. It simply is a place where people that are interested in Dropbox can come and read reviews by other Dropbox users.

Current Dropbox users can leave a short review of the service and in return their referral code is placed in a referral lottery and when someone clicks through to Dropbox one of the referral codes are used.

The site has already started to get some visitors and clicks through to Dropbox. If you are a Dropbox user already come and leave a review and your link. If you don’t use Dropbox come and read some of the review and click through to get and extra 250mb of space free. At the very least you can use your Dropbox account to help backup your blog.

If you run a WordPress powered website you probably know how important it is to backup your website database and files. If you don’t know that you need to be doing that please start!

There are lots of different methods to backup your WordPress database and files and I perform regular backups of my site and clients websites. Did you know that it us actually possible to backup your WordPress website straight to your Dropbox account?

Dropbox is a great tool that syncs files between computers. I still use it regularly to make sure I have the latest files on my laptop from my desktop. They offer 2gb of space for free, more than enough for storing the majority of WordPress users backups.

OnlineBackupDeals.com (note: I help them run their website) has this great post on how you can use a plugin or two and have your WordPress backup sent straight to your Dropbox account. While this method of backing up your WordPress website might not be for everyone it could be handy to occasionally have a copy of your website backup in your Dropbox account.

I tested a few of the plugins out that are mentioned and my favourite was BackWPup. It seemed to offer the most options as far as scheduling and what to backup. Not to mention it offered more choices of backup destinations that just Dropbox. So if you have an Amazon S3 account you could backup to there instead.

I did not spend a great deal of time testing the plugin for how many resources it used. If you have a large blog it could eat up a considerable number of resources. Just a word of caution if you are on shared hosting. If you use the BackWPup plugin what has been your experience regarding server resources? Have you had any problems?

You can never have enough backups so it might be worth trying out BackWPup. If you send your backup to your Dropbox account you would easily have access to it whereever you need it.

Building a website used to be extremely difficult. You had to know HTML, cascading style sheets, possibly javascript and graphic design. Things have changed, now it is possible to build a website in under 60 minutes. Don’t believe me? Here are the steps you need to create your own website in 60 minutes.

Step 1: Register a domain. Using GoDaddy or your other favourite domain registrar get your own domain name registered. Time required 5 minutes.

Step 2: Get hosting. You can spend hours and days researching web hosts. To do this as fast as possible look at a decent WordPress host. I recomend Hostgator, but there are several good WordPress hosts. If you already have a hosting account somewhere you can probably skip this step and simply use an addon domain on your current hosting account. Time required 25 minutes.

Step 3: Change nameservers. This step only takes a few minutes. You need to login to your registrar and set your new domain name nameservers to point to your web hosting account. Time required 5 minutes.

Step 4: Login to your web hosting control panel and use their script installer to install WordPress. Most cPanel hosts have Fantastico to quickly install WordPress. Time required 10 minutes.

Step 5: Login to your new WordPress install and start writing! You have 15 mins left to spare to write your first post.

Now of course this only gets you the bare bones of a website. There is still a great deal more work to do like finding a new theme for your website and customizing it. Adding some plugins to help with different website tasks. Creating a Twitter account to help promote your new website. Creating a Facebook page. Taking the time to update your website regularly with new content. Well, you get the idea, but setting up the core of a website can be done in less than an hour.