My 7 Favorite FireFox Addons

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I’ve been an avid FireFox user for years.  One of the main reasons I like it is the huge variety of Add-ons that are available.  Google and Apple have recently added support for extensions to Chrome and Safari, respectively, but FireFox has such a massive head start on them in terms of Add-ons that it will take a while for them to catch up.

FireFox Addons FTW

I’ve got some Add-ons that I simply can’t live without.  I install them on every new computer the second I start using it.  There are still thousands out there I want to check out, but these are the ones that I use religiously:

SearchStatus – Automatically displays the PageRank and Alexa ranking for every website that you go to.  It can display it as a graphical bar or a text number.  I like the number personally.  I always like to know how much authority and link juice a site has while I am reading it, and this is the best way.  My browser feels naked without it.

Echofon (formerly TwitterFox) – An awesome Twitter client for FireFox.  Unlike TweetDeck, it doesn’t take up any additional resources on your computer.  I love it.

Yet Another Window Resizer – This one is awesome for PPV guys.  It allows you to right-click on any website and resize the browser window to any size you want.  800×600 or 750×550 is a breeze to preview your PPV landers.

LastPass – This is a password manager and auto form filler that makes life easier on the web for marketers.  If you are like me, you have about 100 different logins for traffic sources, ppc networks, affiliate networks, analytics, forums, the list goes on.  LastPass saves all your passwords and locks them down with a Master Password, and it syncs them between all your different browsers and computers.  It also generates strong passwords for you automatically and saves them when you sign up for a new account somewhere.

Xmarks – This completes the syncing package by syncing your bookmarks across multiple computers and browsers.  I used to use it for Password sync as well, but I replaced it with LastPass.

Colorzilla – Gives you an eyedropper tool that you can use to get the hexadecimal value of any color you see on the web.  Comes in really handy for designing banners & creatives as well as websites.

DT Whois – Adds a button to your browser that gives you one-click access to the Whois info for any website you are viewing.  You end up using it a lot more than you think.

There are others that I use every now and then, and there are loads more available that web developers use, but these are the ones that I can’t live without and my FireFox installation isn’t complete until I load them up.  What are some of your favorites?

Thoughts on Tracking202

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There have been plenty of posts about the re-acquisition of Tracking202 by Wes Mahler and Steven Truong, so I’m not going to rehash those here.  All the buzz and discussion about this topic, as well as the original sale to Bloosky, have made me think quite a bit about what was the cause of all this.

Fact is, there would never have been a sale to Bloosky or a re-acquisition in the first place if Wes & Steven hadn’t poured out their sweat and their wallets to create a truly original product.  Although there are competitors now, when 202 came out it was the first of its kind on the block.  They were able to capture almost the entire market for the affiliate tracking software niche with little trouble or competition.

Marketers can take this to heart the next time they are getting frustrated by the arbitrage game.  There is much more out there to making money online than buying traffic from someone and selling it to someone else for more money.  The true innovators in the online space (and in the business world in general) are the people who offered a solution for the needs of their clients in a new (or just better) way.

When you create your own product to promote, you are in control.  There are no advertisers to scrub leads or networks to withhold payment, you are the be-all and end-all of your online empire.  Granted, this is much easier said than done, but the rewards are evident everywhere you look.

Just look at Marcus from Plenty of Fish.  He now has Match.com demanding to know how POF gets more new users every month than they could dream of, and they’ve got huge funding behind them.  Markus Frind started POF all on his own, and kept it simple, and believed in it.  Now they are a force to be reckoned with in the dating industry.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: you have ideas all the time.  You know, the ones that get scribbled down on a piece or paper or just mentally filed back there in your brain with all the other things that will never come to fruition.  Take some time to develop these ideas.  They don’t have to be perfect when you start out, they just need to exist.  You can fine-tune things later.

If you create something that will be a long term asset today, you will be glad for it tomorrow when the next big affiliate industry shake up comes along.  Trust me.

The Case of the Mysterious “J”

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Have you ever received an email from someone with a capital letter “J” at the end of it?  I don’t know if this happens much outside of the Affiliate industry, but I have received a ton of them.  I couldn’t figure out what it meant, so I looked into the issue.

mysterious J

Here is the J in an actual email I got

Apparently, it is caused by people that type a smiley face “:)” into their email while using Microsoft Outlook.  Outlook tries to make it look like a real smiley face by replacing it with “J” character in the Wingdings font, which is a smiley face.  The problem is, that only works if the recipient is using Outlook or another desktop email client that can read the Webdings font.

If you are primarily using Gmail like I do, then you will only see the “J” in a default font like Times New Roman.  So, just in case any of you have ever seen this “J”, now you know what it means.  Heck, maybe it will catch on and people will just start typing “J” instead of “:)” on purpose.

Or not.

AffExpert > AffPortal (A Review)

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AffPortal was the first “PPV Tools” website on the block.  It took a whole bunch of tasks that PPV marketers have to do on a regular basis, and made them faster and easier.  Things like URL scraping, etc.  Now that it’s been out for a while, a competitor has sprung up called AffExpert.  At first I was skeptical, because I am a huge fan of AffPortal.  But once I got the chance to dig in and use the tools during their free Beta period (which has expired), they won me over.

Most of the tools are self-explanatory by the title, but there are a couple of things that I really like about AffExpert’s system that make it unique:

  1. When you are scraping URLs, it automatically shows you the Alexa, and Quantcast rankings for all of them.  This is pretty cool because you can tell how much traffic a target is going to get before you even test it out on the PPV network.
  2. There is a really cool Basket system that you can save all the URLs to that you want to keep, and then download them all at once in one nice file.  This eliminates the all-too-common problem of duplicate URLs you get when you are scraping  through other methods, and it will also give you the option to add or remove the final slash (/) at the end of the URLs.  Since PPV networks like DirectCPV consider “domain.com” to be a different URL than “domain.com/”, this can be handy.
AffExpert URL Scraper

URL Scraper in action

Here are the PPV/CPV tools available:

  • Related Keywords
  • URL Scraper
  • Site Analytics (Alexa, Compete, Quantcast)
  • Domain Expander
  • Related Domains Finder
  • Top 1 Mil Domain Explorer
  • Domain Typos
  • URL Query Generator
  • YouTube Scraper
  • URL Follower

There are also some PPC tools:

  • Google Campaign Builder
  • Competition Spy
  • Adsense Finder
  • Keyword Grouper

There is also a self-hosted Weighted URL Rotator.  You can install this on your own server so you don’t have to worry about the data being snatched by somebody else (unless they have access to your server, and then you are just a moron).

I haven’t personally used the PPC tools much, so I can’t report on how they work.  That being said, it’s nice to get them for the one monthly fee, and if you are paying for another keyword tool that does the same thing, you can eliminate that extra expense and just use one tool set for everything.

All in all, I highly recommend AffExpert.  I use it personally on every PPV campaign I do, and it is a major time saver.  You can get a 7-day, fully functional trial for only $1, so what are you waiting for, give it a shot!

P.S.  Use promo code “BETAUSER” to get a discounted membership for life.

Are Your Referral Commissions Getting Shaved?

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Here’s a quick history: Affiliate Networks have been doing Referral Programs forever.  The concept is simple, you send them affiliates that you know or from your blog, and they give you a percentage of their earnings as a referral commission. It’s usually between 2% to 5% of the gross payouts that are generated by the referred affiliate.

Networks started doing this because it was an effective way to promote their networks on a pay-for-performance basis.  It became immensely popular with the make money online bloggers, and they started making quite a nice bit of cash for their referrals.

Fast-forward to today, and the environment is quite different.  Affiliate Networks are dropping like flies, margins are tight due to the competition, and a lot of referral programs have been phased out.  In some cases, percentages have been dropped.  In other cases, rules have been implemented where the referring party must have a certain amount of earnings each month personally with the network, or else he forfeits his referral commission.  This keeps people from joining networks just to refer and not to promote offers themselves.

What seems to be happening now, however, is a bit different.  The new trick for networks to get around paying for referrals is to tell them to sign up for a second account (without the referral link) after they have been approved for the network.  They usually use the excuse that they won’t get the best payouts if they are working under a referral account.  Since the affiliates always want the best payouts, they comply.

That's ShadyGranted, margins are tight, but I think this is kinda shady.  If a network has reached out to an affiliate or a blogger for referrals, and they send them people, they should get paid for their volume.  If networks can’t afford to pay for their referrals because of their margins, then they should just cancel their referral program all together.

That’s my two cents.  Has this ever happened to any of you?

Google TV: Coming To Your Living Room

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Google is at it again. After dominating the search world, and making a play to dominate the mobile advertising world, now they are inviting themselves into your living room with a new product called Google TV.  It is a joint effort with Sony, and it is supposed to be way better than WebTV (remember that?).

The Big G definitely has their work cut out for them.  It’s been tried before, and it didn’t do too well.  Nowadays there are plenty of Media Center PCs about.  So if consumers want web on their TV, wouldn’t they just get one of those? Only time will tell.

Google TV

The interesting angle here is for marketers.  As with mobile, there will be a big opportunity for people who jump into this fast.  There’s a very strong possibility that if Google is the one behind it, there is going to be advertising involved.  What new types of ads and user engagement will Google TV provide?  Capturing someones attention while they are at home and relaxing could be a good thing for some offers, especially entertainment-based or even dating offers.

I haven’t heard anything yet on how the ads will work, and I’m only guessing at this point that there will even be ads.  Maybe the new device will just display the web we are all used to seeing, and there won’t be any platform specific ads.  Either way, new and different ways to connect with people online are springing up at a rapid rate, and the next ten years looks to be a good decade for the online world…

60% of the Time, It Works Every Time

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There’s no such thing as a surefire winner in Affiliate Marketing. That hot campaign that you have making $1,000 a day right now? It won’t last. The vertical that you have been tearing up for the last two years? It won’t last. Markets change. Audiences get wiser. Traffic sources dry up. There are about a million things that could go wrong at any point in time in this industry, and if you don’t have your income diversified, you will get stung sooner or later.

Are You Diversified?

If this is your business strategy, you are in trouble.

Diversification is something that you hear a lot about in the Investing world. Your broker will tell you, “You don’t want to put all of your money in stocks, or in bonds, or in cash alone. You want to have an even mix so you are both protected against loss and also maximizing your gain.”  Truer words were never said for Affiliate Marketing as well.

The absolute worst position to be in is one successful campaign on one traffic source.  That is an empty bank account waiting to happen.  Most affiliates know well enough that they shouldn’t just sit back and be lazy with one campaign, but I know at least some don’t. Avoid this at all costs.

Another thing you need to watch is when you are running multiple campaigns, but they are all on the same traffic source.  At least you are safe if one of your campaigns goes down. But what if the traffic source dries up?  Then you are back to square one.  Many affiliates were really slammed when Facebook tightened up their restrictions, you can learn from that.  Don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket, the Google basket, or even the PPV basket.  What if your network suddenly tells you that they aren’t going to accept any PPV traffic anymore on any campaigns?  These are tough questions that you need to be asking yourself on a regular basis if you want to survive in Affiliate Marketing.

The best thing that you can do to protect yourself from a bad situation is to build up an asset that belongs to you completely.  Create a content-based website in a solid niche that’s been around forever, or just that you can get a lot of traffic from a certain demographic and then sell the traffic.  Or you can build an email list.  An email list is an asset that you can take with you and keep promoting to no matter what happens to your offers, your networks, or other traffic sources.

The number one thing to remember here is that when you are buying traffic from someone and then selling it to someone else, you are the most vulnerable link in the chain and you can be replaced or eliminated at any time.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have job security by arbitraging, even for one second.

The Top 5 Free Open Source Programs

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The amount of programs that are available for free these days on the internet is astounding. Software that would have cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars just a few short years ago can be had for nothing, all thanks to the Open Source movement in the tech community. Technically speaking, Open Source means that the source code for the software is freely available to be downloaded, compiled, and edited by anyone. But for non-programmer-types (me included), it means that you can use the software for free!

Here are a few of my favorite Open Source equivalents of popular software packages:

1. OpenOffice.org (Microsoft Office / Productivity)

open officeThis one is probably the most popular Open Source program out there (except for FireFox of course). I haven’t bought a new version of Microsoft Office for years because of it. The newest version is practically identical to Office in functionality. As is often the case, the only real thing missing is the Templates and Wizards for making pre-formatted documents. However, these can be found online for free as well with a little extra searching.

2. GIMP (Photoshop / Image Editing)

gimpGIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It started out on Linux, but now there are Windows and Mac OS X versions as well. This will be plenty powerful to handle about 90% of your image editing and graphic design needs. For most people, they will never miss the extra bells & whistles that Photoshop has. This is perfect for installing on a laptop or second computer, if not your primary workstation.

3. Pidgin (AIM / Yahoo / IM)

pidgin

Pidgin is another Linux convert that is available for the major platforms. It is a very lightweight and slick little IM program. It supports all of the major chat protocols, and it won’t pester you with annoying ads like the default AIM and Yahoo clients. You can sign into all of your profiles at once and chat across multiple protocols, including Facebook Chat.

4. FileZilla (WS_FTP)

filezillaThis is hands-down my favorite FTP program. I’ve used paid software like WS_FTP in the past, and FileZilla blows it away in speed and reliability. And did I mention it’s free? This is a no-brainer download for anybody that works with websites at all.

5. ThunderBird (Microsoft Outlook)

thunderbirdIf you are reading this blog, there is a good chance that you are already using Mozilla’s FireFox browser (according to my logs, over 60% of my readers use FireFox, and only 9% use Internet Explorer; way to go guys!). But you may not know that Mozilla has another excellent program called ThunderBird that is a totally free replacement for Microsoft Outlook. You do have to download an additional free plugin to get the Calendar functionality, but it is well worth the extra 30 seconds that should take. I personally like ThunderBird even better than Outlook, it is much faster.

So there you have it, a first step into the world of Open Source software. Beyond these, a simple Google search for “Open Source Software” will bring up hundreds more programs to check out. What are your favorites?

Linkshiftr – Like Bit.ly With Brains

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URL Shorteners have become ubiquitous in today’s social-media-crazed internet world. Marketers have even begun using services such as bit.ly to cloak their affiliate links and make them more attractive. I recently discovered a new service that is actually directed at marketers, it’s called Linkshiftr. It has a pretty cool set of tools that you can use to experiment with your links, almost like a Prosper202 lite. Here are some of the features:linkshiftr

  • Variable Passing – You can pass variables dynamically to your destination URLs. This will be just the ticket for marketers looking to add SubIDs or dynamic PHP variables (like keywords) onto their links. You can pass as many variables as you would like.
  • Weighted Link Rotator – This is something that PPV marketers especially will like. You can add multiple URLs, and then choose how you want to have them rotated. For example, if you want Offer A to be shown 70% of the time, Offer B to be shown 20% of the time, and Offer C to be shown 10% of the time, this can handle it for you in a breeze.
  • Conversion Tracking – Here is where Linkshiftr really sets itself apart from the competition. Services like bit.ly allow you to see how many clicks your links have gotten, but to my knowledge only Linkshiftr lets you place a pixel and do conversion tracking. This could be extremely useful for marketers that are just setting up a quick and dirty campaign to test an offer before going into Prosper202, creating a landing page and a full blown campaign.

You can try out Linkshiftr for free by signing up for an account here, but if you want to use the Conversion Tracking feature you will have to sign up for a Pro account for $9.99 per month. The free account has all the other features though, so it’s definitely still useful.

Has anybody else tried this out yet? What are your thoughts?